A travelling cripple, by the trunk cut short, Of well-formed characters, with chalk inscribed That field-ward takes her walk with decent steps. From The Prelude VII, 149-210. Τ CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834) HE Prince of Essayists has gained the affection of his readers through the humanity and the charming style. of his Essays of Elia. It seems as though he were conversing amiably with you about his experiences and ideas. He takes you into his confidence and allows you to see his true self. Even when he is instructing you about old china or old plays, he does it so gently that you are delighted and amused by the instruction. No other essayist in English literature has revealed his personality so completely. The reader envies Lamb's contemporaries because of their opportunity of acquaintance with such an engaging personality. Lamb has portrayed the London in which he was born and where he lived a busy life. Before he entered upon his struggles to make a living, he had seven years of schooling at Christ's Hospital. At fourteen he went to work as a clerk in the South-Sea House. Two years of experience there furnished him with the material for his essay on that famous firm. For the next thirtythree years he was a clerk in the India House. His attitude toward the drudgery of this routine work is evident from The Superannuated Man, in which he celebrated his release by means of the grant of a pension by the firm he had served so faithfully. He wrote: "If peradventure, Reader, it has been thy lot to waste the golden years of thy life-thy shining youth-in the irksome confinement of an office; to have thy prison days prolonged through middle age down to decrepitude and silver hairs, without hope of release or respite; to have lived to forget that there are such things as holydays, or to remember them but as the prerogatives-of childhood; then, and then only, will you be able to appreciate my deliverance." During all these years Lamb had found his recreation in conversations with his friends and in writing. In his essays he inter preted with humor and pathos the life about him. They are a mingling of fact and fiction in an intensely human manner. Their chief charm lies in their quaint expressions, their far-fetched comparisons, and their whimsical humor. Surely Lamb is Prince of Essayists. THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE Reader, 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,1 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.2 This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. 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 porticoes; 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 gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long 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.3 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 superfoetation 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 super-human 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 thee, in the heyday of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business-to the idle and merely contemplative to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quiet—a cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past -the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves, with their old fantastic flourishes and decorative rubric interlacings; their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of ciphers; with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of business or bill of lading; the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library, are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled penknives (our ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The pounce-boxes of our days have gone retrograde. The very clerks which I remember in the South-Sea House I speak of forty years back-had an air very different from those in the public offices that I have had to do with since. They partook of the genius of the place! They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of |