In this literal obedience we may almost say none but himself can be his parallel. Some there have been to sneer at Lamb's occupation "at the desk and on the high stool." Only conceive Goethe, it has been suggested, with that lofty forehead and stately form bending over a ledger; or the wizard Coleridge, with those dreamy eyes, deep in calculation of the price of stocks. A happier and better man even Coleridge might have been, had circumstances constrained him to some definite daily employment; happier and better he must have been, had he possessed that practical plodding sense of duty which, for many long years, impelled and enabled Charles Lamb to fulfil his most ungenial taskwork. "Thirty-three years of slavery," he called them, when their tale was told. Irksome at times, almost beyond sufferance, became the tyranny of ledger, desk, and high* stool. One is reminded of the appeal to "Peter" in the Canterbury Tales: A propos of "high stool," Mr. de Quincey's narrative of his first interview with Lamb contains an amusingly told though" very, very little incident." The then Oxford Student, on inquiring for Lamb at the India House, was shown into a room "in which was a very lofty writing-desk, separated by a still higher railing from that part of the floor on which the profane-the laity, like myself -were allowed to approach the clerus, or clerkly rulers of the room," of whom some half-dozen were there perched aloft, quill-driving with might and main. Walking into one of the two open doorways of the railing, the visitor (to resume his own words) "stood closely by the side of him who occupied the first place within the little aisle," touched his arm, and inquired (pointing to the superscription on Wordsworth's letter of introduction) for Mr. Charles Lamb. "The gentleman smiled; it was a smile not to be forgotten. This was Lamb. And here occurred a very, very little incident-one of those which pass so fugitively that they are gone and hurrying away into Lethe almost before your attention can have arrested them; but it was an incident which, to me, who happened to notice it, served to express the courtesy and delicate consideration of Lamb's manners. The seat upon which he sat was a very high one; so absurdly high, by the way, that I can imagine no possible use or sense in such an altitude, unless it were to restrain the occupant from playing truant at the fire, by opposing Alpine difficulties to his descent. Whatever might be the original purpose of this aspiring seat, one serious dilemma arose from it, and this it was which gave the occasion to Lamb's act of courtesy. . . . . The act of descending from his throne, a very elaborate process, with steps and stages analogous to those on horseback-of slipping your right foot out of the stirrup, throwing your leg over the crupper, &c.-was, to all intents and purposes, the same thing as dismounting from a great elephant of a horse. Therefore it both was, and was felt to be by Lamb, supremely ridiculous. On the other hand, to have sat still and stately upon this aerial station, to have bowed condescendingly from this altitude, would have been-not ludicrous indeed; performed by a very superb person, and supported by a very superb bow, it might have been vastly fine, and even terrifying to many young gentlemen under sixteen: but it would have had an air of ungentlemanly assumption. Between these extremes, therefore, Lamb had to choose; between appearing ridiculous himself for a moment, by going through a ridiculous evolution, which no man could execute with grace; or, on the other hand, appearing lofty and assuming, in a degree which his truly humble nature (for he was the humblest of men in the pretensions Or of the laureate's picnicing Francis, who thus moralises, inter alia, over (also inter alia) a dusky loaf that smells of home, and a pasty costly made of quail and pigeon, lark and leveret, "like fossils of the rock, with golden yolks imbedded and injellied”. Oh! who would cast and balance at a desk, "Here I am, then," writes Elia the Superannuated Man to Wordsworth, in 1825, "after thirty-three years' slavery, sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with 4417. a year for the remainder of my life." A warp of sadness crosses the woof of gladness. It is more evident in a following sentence: "I came home FOR EVER on Tuesday in last week." Painfully Painfully so in another: "Now, when all is holyday, there are no holydays." From the date of his mittimus his spirits fell. And the more he ventured on the charms of retirement and seclusion, the gloomier he became. Even the suburbs of the Great City sufficed not for this thoroughbred Urban—not, however, of the Sylvanus lineage. Dulcius urbe quid est ? asks Tibullus. Carlagnulus asks the same thing, in other words, a hundred times over. He seems to have been of the same mind in this article of faith with Madame de Staël, who, it has been observed, though born in the midst of the most magnificent scenery, thought, like Dr. Johnson, that there was no scene equal to the high tide of human existence in the heart of a populous city: "Give me," she cried, when her guests were in ecstasies with the Lake of Geneva and its enchanted shores, "give me the Rue du Bac! give me to live in Paris, though in a fourth story, and on a hundred louis a year." To her too sensitive which he put forward for himself) must have shrunk from with horror. Nobody who knew Lamb can doubt how the problem was solved: he began to dismount instantly; and, as it happened that the very first round of his descent obliged him to turn his back upon me as if for a sudden purpose of flight, he had an excuse for laughing, which he did heartily-saying, at the same time, something to this effect, that I must not judge from first appearances; that he should revolve upon me; that he was not going to fly; and other facetiæ, which challenged a general laugh from the clerical brotherhood."-Autobiography of an English Opium-eater ("Recollections of Chas. Lamb:" Part I.). Chaucer: "The Schipmanne's Tale." †Tennyson: "Audley Court." Similarly it has been remarked of Madame Geoffrin, by one of her biographers, that "elle était d'avis qu'il n'y a pas de meilleur air que celui de Paris,' et, en quelque lieu qu'elle eût pu être, elle aurait préféré son ruisseau de la rue Saint-Honoré, comme Madame de Staël regrettait celui de la rue du Bac." nostrils, l'agriculture sentait le fumier. Lamb affected more contempt for rustic life than he felt: it was one of his whims to pretend a complacent compassion for country people, in the spirit of the citizen's wife in the play, who says, "Ay, poor souls, I was amongst 'em once."* Partly affected, however, as this disdain might be at one period of his life, he was but too really and painfully ill at ease when, in life's decline, he sought seclusion, and found too much of it, in a quiet retreat at Enfield. It was the old story of Villicus: Tu mediastinus tacitâ prece rura petebas: Nunc Urbem et ludos et balnea villicus optas,t partly to be explained by the mere law of reaction, Rure ego viventem, tu dicis in Urbe beatum. Very little experience of Enfield tranquillity sufficed to determine, with peremptory decision, the intensity of Lamb's envy for citizen, his horror of for citizen, his horror of pagan, life: Solos felices viventes clamat in Urbe.‡ Had he made one at the Convivium Religiosum of Erasmus, he would have battled stoutly on the side of Timotheus§ against Eusebius and rural felicity and all that. He had not a great deal in common with Horace Walpole, but probably he could have hugged him for writing to Sir Horace Mann: "Were I physician, I would prescribe nothing but recipe, CCCLXV drachm. Londin." Born, *1st Cit. Wife. Lord, how fine the fields be! What sweet living 'tis in the country! 2nd Cit. Wife. Ay, poor souls, God help 'em, they live as contentedly as one of us. 1st Cit. Wife. My husband's cousin would have had me gone into the country last year. Wert thou ever there? 2nd Cit. Wife. Ay, poor souls, I was amongst 'em once. 1st Cit. Wife. And what kind of creatures are they, for love of God? 2nd Cit. Wife. Very good people, God help 'em. [Adding, however, when pressed to go there,] Alas, 'tis no place for us." 1st Cit. Wife. Why, prithee? 2nd Cit. Wife. Why, you can have nothing there; there's nobody cries brooms. [How this argument would have told on Charles, with his ear for London cries!] 1st Cit. Wife. No? 2nd Cit. Wife. No, truly, nor milk? 1st Cit. Wife. Nor milk, how do they? 2nd Cit. Wife. They are fain to milk themselves in the country, &c., &c.— A King and No King. † Horat. Epistol., I. xiv. 14, 15.. Horat. Sermon, i. 1. Euseb. Cum omnia nunc vernent et rideant in agris, demiror esse, qui fumosis urbibus delectentur. Ti. Non omnes capiuntur aspectâ florum, aut pratorum vernantium, aut fontium amniumve; aut, si capiuntur, est aliud quod magis juvet," &c. ERASMI, Colloqu. Famil. Walpole's Letters, vol. i. p. 309.. (Ed. 1846.) as he tells us, under the shadow of St. Dunstan's steeple, just where the conflux of the eastern and western inhabitants of this twofold city meet and justle in friendly opposition at Temple-bar, he ascribes to this being born, as it were, in a crowd, the entire affection which possessed him for city life, "amounting to an almost insurmountable aversion from solitude and rural scenes." Which aversion, he adds, was never interrupted or suspended, except during his temporary enthralment by a "fair-haired maid:" every man, while the passion is upon him, being for a time at least addicted to groves and meadows and purling streams. "For my own part," he goes on to aver, "now the fit is past, I have no hesitation in declaring, that a mob of happy faces crowding up at the pit door of Drury-lane Theatre, just at the hour of six, gives me ten thousand sincerer pleasures than I could ever receive from all the flocks of silly sheep that ever whitened the plains of Arcadia or. Epsom Downs."* He loved to express himself "strongly," in this fashion-careless whether people of "Imperfect Sympathies" took it all literally or not; rather pleased indeed if they did, for the passion for mysti fying and hoaxing was at all times hot within him. His manner of talking was enough to perplex most of those who approached him for the first, and some for the hundred and first, time. Talfourd. refers to the "wild contrasts of expression which sometimes startled strangers." But he adds that no one acquainted with Lamb's story will wonder at the eccentric wildness of his mirth-his violent changes from the serious to the farcical. "His whim, however, almost always bordered upon wisdom." His sallies remind us of what Madame Roland said of the boutades of a most un-Lamb-like contemporary-elles font, chose très-rare, rire et penser tout à la fois. Leigh Hunt talks of "those humours of tragical fancy with which he [Lamb] refreshed his ultra-humanity." Hazlitt said: "His jests scald like tears, and he probes a question with a play upon words." Thus talking, matter-of-fact people knew not what to make of him. And thus writing (for he wrote as he talked; the man and the writer were in him not distinct and discrepant), there are thousands who, as they read, know not what to make of him to this hour. For he is by no means the writer to "take" with the million. To become a universal favourite he must forfeit his most distinguishing and exceptional traits. Et voic pourquoi. A seeming paradox, but a paradox in no bad sense, is propounded by Mr. de Quincey in his assertion, that in every literature of large compass some authors will be found to rest much of the interest which surrounds them on their essential non-popularity: that, in fact, such authors interest because to the world they are not inte Letters in the Reflector. ("The Londoner.") resting; that they attract by means of their repulsion. He points out how the world has an instinct for recognising its own, and recoils from certain qualities when exemplified in books, with the same disgust or defective sympathy as would have governed it in real life-turning away its face, for instance, from qualities of child-like simplicity, of shy profundity, or of inspired self-communion, towards grosser, bolder, more determined, or more intelligible expressions of character and intellect and doing this equally in literature, as in life. "Charles Lamb, if any ever was, is amongst the class here contemplated; he, if any ever has, ranks amongst writers whose works are destined to be for ever unpopular, and yet for ever interesting; interesting, moreover, by means of those very qualities which guarantee their non-popularity"-simply because the same qualities which will be found forbidding to the worldly and the thoughtless, and insipid to many even amongst robust and powerful minds, are exactly those which will continue to command a select audience in every generation. "spirit Thus, the essays of Elia traverse a "peculiar field of observation sequestered from general interest;" and are composed in a too delicate and unobtrusive to catch the ear of the noisy crowd, clamouring for strong sensations." In this quality, however, lies the charm they present to the fit audience though few-in this "retiring delicacy," in the "pensiveness chequered by gleams of the fanciful, and the humour that is touched with cross-lights of pathos," together with the "picturesque quaintness of the objects described," and the "constant recurrence to ancient recollection and to decaying forms of household life, as things retiring before the tumult of new and revolutionary generations." There must be sympathy with the personality of such a writer, ere his writings can be found to interest-sympathy with his idiosyncrasy, with his peculiarities, with the differentiating mark of his personal Ego. And who, like Charles Lamb, reveals himself to us, as the phrase goes, out and out? If Elia is a mask, the Essays are no disguise. They are himself in print, not revised and corrected for publication; not trimmed, and smoothed down, and pared away. In a sense, he wears his heart upon his sleeve; and, of course, daws have pecked at it, and will again. In that quaint piece of genial self-portraiture and dainty-sweet melancholy, the essay called "New Year's Eve," how characteristically he declares his attachment to things below, and owns his love of "this green carth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes, and the sweet security of streets." A new state of being, he confesses, fairly staggers him: his household gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood; they do not willingly seek Lavinian shores. "Sun and sky," he asks, humorously, yet wistfully, tearfully, "and breeze, |