common stature, rather sparingly than athletically formed; but his wiry muscles and agile limbs were well adapted to those athletic exercises in which he loved to excel, even more than in the arena of scholastic competition. It is a curious reflection in the biography of one so gifted, that he was as emulous of being considered an excellent boxer, leaper, wrestler, and runner, as scholar, and that he risked his life on more than one occasion in order to demonstrate his agility. The ideal of bold and manly independence which Leyden had formed in his youth, he maintained in all circumstances with a determined and irrepressible egotism. He would dissonantly roar forth some rude ditty in the company of the most fashionable, in order to prove that he was not afraid to sing before them. He ate raw meat in the presence of Ritson, because he knew that that crabbed, nervous virtuoso had a horror even at well-cooked animal food; and he argued in the same bold, loud, harsh tones with man or woman, gentle or semple, in parlour or saloon, in order to maintain his point, in which he always saw his own independence involved. He was proud of his humble origin rather than ashamed of it; he knew that his own intrinsic merits alone had brought him into communion with richer and better-bred people than himself, and he could not fail to discover that he met none his superior in attainments and talents, and from this sense may have sprung his carelessness to conventional forms. He never took offence, however, at decent criticisms upon his manners, and rather encouraged by his jocularity than suppressed the raillery directed against his roughness. To the glory and honour of the humble but gifted student be it recorded, however, that his moral character was above the breath of suspicion. He was deeply impressed with the principles of morality inculcated in the sacred oracles of God, and he maintained them untainted through life.

6

In 1800, John Leyden became a licentiate of the Church of Scotland, and preached in several of the city churches. In the autumn of the same year he accompanied two young foreigners on the tour of the Hebrides and Highlands, and made many investigations into Highland traditions and manners; the only record of his tour extant, however, is his beautiful poem of the Mermaid,' published in the Border Minstrelsy.' In 1801, Leyden furnished the ballad called the Elf-King' to Lewis's Tales of Wonder;' and in the following year he devoted himself with uncommon enthusiasm to the procuring of materials for the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border;' relative to which pursuit Sir Walter Scott records the following anecdote as an instance of his zeal : An interesting fragment had been obtained of an ancient historical ballad, but the remainder, to the great disturbance of the editor and his coadjutor, could not be recovered. Two days afterwards, while Scott was sitting with some company after dinner, a sound was heard at a distance, like that of the whistling of a tempest through the torn rigging of a vessel that scuds before it. The sounds increased as they approached more near; and Leyden (to the great astonishment of such of the guests as did not know him) burst into the room, chanting the desiderated ballad with the most enthusiastic gesture and all the energy of the sawtones of his voice. It turned out that he had walked between forty and fifty miles and back again, for the sole purpose of visiting an old person who possessed this precious remnant of antiquity.' It was Leyden who supplied the essentials for the Dissertation on Fairy Superstition,' in the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border; and he is also author of the ballads, Lord Soulis' and the Cout of Keildar.' In 1801, he edited a curious old work of uncertain origin, and date 1548, called the Complaynt of Scotland,' the preliminary remarks on which are full of the most curious information. In 1802, Leyden became editor of the Scots Magazine,' of which Constable was publisher, and continued in this situation five or six months, contributing several pieces of poetry and prose; and in this year he wrote his Scenes of Infancy.'

The restless, imaginative mind of Leyden, ever living in a region of wonders, and laughing at the obstacles and

dangers of the most desperate enterprises, could find no rest for itself in the quiet, passive tenor of Scottish clerical life; and in 1802 he had made overtures to the African Society to pursue those African researches so hopefully begun and so fatally terminated by Mungo Park. His friends, in order to divert him from this suicidal project, applied to government for some situation that would enable him to gratify his longing for the means of making researches into oriental literature. There was no situation open in the Indian department but that of surgeon's assistant, which could only be held by a person who had | a surgical degree, and who could sustain an examination before the Medical Board. In the incredibly short space of six months, John Leyden had added to bis clerical license the diploma of surgeon, and was summoned to join the Christmas fleet of Indiamen, having been appointed assistant-surgeon on the Madras establishment. Of course | it was understood that his rare talents were to be devoted to pursuits similar to those of Sir William Jones, whom he soon hoped to surpass in oriental erudition. In 1803 he arrived at Madras, and was immediately transferred to a situation promising every opportunity of gratifying the main object of his expatriation; but, alas! the climate of India was uncongenial to the health of the Scottish borderer, and the sturdy and hardy descendant of midnight rievers, who would have scorned to yield to mountain's mist or snow, succumbed to the fever-breeding malaria of Madras. He was constrained to leave this station for Prince of Wales' Island, in order to restore his wasted strength.

While at Puloo Penang, where he partially recovered, he made some curious and valuable researches concerning the language, literature, and descent of the Indo-Chinese tribes, which he laid before the Asiatic Society at Calcutta, l' whither he repaired in 1806. The health of Dr Leyden did not succumb so much to climate, perhaps, as to his own irrepressible and inordinate activity. I cannot be idle!' he exclaimed, when told by his physician that he must rest or die; whether I die or live, the wheel must go round till the last;' and so, under the depression of fever and liver complaint, he studied ten hours a day.

6

Sir John Malcolm, governor of Calcutta, a countryman of his own, relates the following anecdote of him on his landing in the chief city of Bengal. When he arrived at Calcutta in 1805,' says Sir John, 'I was most solicitous regarding his reception in the society of the Indian capital. I intreat you, my dear friend,' I said to him, on the day he landed, to be careful of the impression you make on entering this community; try to learn a little English, and do be silent upon literary subjects except among literary men.' 'Learn English!' he exclaimed; 'no, never; it was trying to learn that language that spoilt my Scotch ; and as to being silent, I wil! promise to hold my tongue if you will make fools hold theirs."

Leyden was appointed a professor of the College of Bengal; and shortly after he exchanged this situation for the judgeship of the twenty-four purgunnahs of Calcutta. His duties in this capacity were partly military and partly judicial, and brought him in contact very much with the natives, whose language and habits he well understood. His whole emoluments were expended upon the purchase of oriental manuscripts and the employment of native ! teachers, under whom he studied night and day, to the total engrossment of all his spare time and the detriment 1 of his health.

Dr Leyden accompanied the British expedition to Java in 1811, high in the hope of adding to his literary stores, but death swept him away three days before the reduction of the island.' He died on the 28th of August, 1511, not thirty-six years of age. His death was an irreparable loss to literature and to his friends, and a sad visitation to his parents and his country. Consumed by the ardour of his genius and of his devotion to the pursuit of knowledge, he laid down his life before he had seen the meridian of manhood, and

'A distant and a deadly shore Has Leyden's cold remains.

PORTRAIT GALLERY.

CHARLES LAMB.

CHARLES LAMB was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, on the 18th of February, 1775. His father, John Lamb, had left Lincoln when a boy, and had come to London with as bright dreams and scarcely brighter prospects than worshipful Dick Whittington. He had entered the service of Mr Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple as footboy, and, eventually, so outgrew his livery and original position, that in his maturer years he had expanded, in the words of Elia, into Mr Salt's 'clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, his stop-watch, auditor, treasurer.' He had married, and settled in the obscure domain of his duties, labouring with patient assiduity to win his bread, and that of those who fed his heart with affection in requital of his toils. A son and daughter blessed the union of John Lamb and his matronly wife. Nature seemed at first satisfied with the reproduction to each of one infantile object of peculiar affection, for the boy had become twelve years old and the girl ten, before Charles was born to revivify and concentrate in himself the love of all his father's amiable household. For seven years Charles Lamb resided in the seclusion of his home in the Temple; and then, through the patronage of Thomas Yeates, governor, he was admitted to the school of Christ's Hospital, whose cloisters, with yellow stockings and flowing blue gown, he trod until he was fifteen. Nature had denied the lad a masculine frame, as well as that selfish domineering spirit which compensates to small boys for the lack of physical strength, and makes them commanders and governors of boys, as they often have become of men; but the gentleness of manners and the generosity of heart which characterised the Charles Lamb of riper years, and made all who knew him love bim, won from even the selfish young monks of Christ's Hospital the homage of universal affection and gentle consideration. The most robust and virile were conquered by his sweet timidity; the stern and hold respected his corporeal infirmity. Thrown into himself, by a defect in his speech, and constitutionally averse to those rougher pastimes, for which his physical debility incapacitated him, Charles Lamb indulged in antique phantasies, which were alike the result of all his associations and education, until his keenly observing and amiable mind became like some old Gothic fane, quaint yet beautiful in its construction; elaborate yet fantastic in its rich and varied ornaments; with capacities for religious gloom, deep as sacristy or shady aisle, and for a joyous light, sweet and softened as that which falls upon a marble tomb, through the medium of a stained oriel, upon a lovely midsummer's noon.

Lamb's lingual impediment, which nervous agitation increased, claimed the indulgence of his teachers; and his sweetness of disposition, joined to an acute and powerful intellect, won their sympathy and respect. No harsh inhumanities, dealt out in the name of curatives, intermitted his thoughtful habits of boyhood, or added to the natural tristesse of his mind. The classics were his favourite schoolday studies; and the old English classics were the mental aliment of the man. His home, in whose sombre shades were embosomed the deep springs of parental and the greenness of fraternal love, was full of old associations; the hospital and school, in which he passed his most impressible years, were buttressed and roofed with ideas and memories of the past, and lent a bias to the boy's mind. Lamb's abilities and classical attainments marked him out at school for distinction; but the invincible stammer in his speech consigned him to sedentary drudgery and ignoble obscurity. While less able contemporaries marched from behind him to the University, with their eyes illuminated with hopeful ambition, he modestly and unmurmuringly retired to occupy the humble tripod of a scrivener in the South Sea House, where he passed a three months' apprenticeship, under the cognisance of his brother John, preparatory to his appointment to the accountant's office of

the East India Company, which he obtained on the 5th of April, 1792.

Lamb's youth was passed in tenderly watching the declining years of his parents, and in gleaning rare thoughts with his sister, from the rich harvest of good old English authors, which constituted the library of his father's employer Mr Salt; and the even tenor of his life was sometimes interrupted and enlivened by a dinner with some of his old schoolmates, when the Cambridge vacations allowed of their return to London. These re-unions must have vividly recalled the memory of Charles Lamb's blighted prospects, but they never produced one visible sentiment of regret; he had early learned to dissociate himself from all individual sense, save as a dreamer or a lover. The worldly, present or prospective, as related to himself, had no power to disturb his equanimity. His world of griefs and shadows was of the past; of the present he had none save the most kindly and generous thoughts. Upon one of those convivial occasions which occurred upon the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes or Gunpowder Plot Day, Lamb's friends, amused with the flapping brim of his round hat, pinned it up on both sides, in the form of a cocked-hat; and he, nothing loath, walked home towards the Temple in his usual sauntering way, with the fantastic sombrera on his head. As he was moving down Ludgate Hill, some gay young bloods, who had been inspired with loyal toasts, and whose imaginations were excited by errant aspirations against conspiracy, screamed out upon beholding him, 'The veritable Guy! no man of straw!' and, seizing him, they forewith bore him back to St Paul's churchyard, where they seated him on a post and left him. Ever after, Lamb bore the name of Guya soubriquet at which he smiled, and in the humorous origin of which he found as much mirth as his less interested friends. Occasional association with the companions of his youth broke the dull current of the poor clerk's monotonous life, but it could not satisfy the yearnings of his soul; he must have something to admire, some luminary superior to his own light to shed a halo of love and sympathy around the years of his exile, from that sphere in which he felt, if he was not able to act, in which he deserved to be if he was not. His consciousness of intellectual power, humble and modest as that consciousness was, and the construction of his sympathetic mind, must have been fruitful of sources of regret to him, as he contemplated those mechanical labours to which high intellectual sympathy was alone calculated to make him feel resigned. In Coleridge and friendship he found enough to satisfy him for his estrangement from Alma Mater, and for the extinction of his academical ambition. The inspired charity boy' had been the object of his admiration at school, and he became the enthroned tenant of his adoration and love, when both began to tread the path of laborious life. The splendid genius, and glowing, generous enthusiasm of Coleridge, touched with electric vigour the latent powers of Lamb. The higher qualities of Coleridge's genius elevated and developed those of his timid friend, until they felt their own original strength and walked alone; and the friendship of Coleridge, whom he early recognised as one of the most splendid geniuses of his day, satisfied the aspiration of Lamb for intellectual distinction. It is to Coleridge's friendship with Lamb that the world of letters is indebted for one of its most distinguished ornaments. The great erratic genius, so full of vague thoughts and grand suggestions, has the honour of suggesting and producing one great and complete work at least, and that was Charles Lamb.

The incidents of Lamb's life, save one-one terrible and trying as ever man with generous soul endured-were nothing more than a succession of friendships with the most distinguished literary men of this century; the epochs of his publications; and those other common occurrences which constitute the casualties of every-day life. He toiled at his desk in the India House; read poetry and the drama with his sister; wrote letters to his friends; changed his lodgings from the Temple to the city, and from the city to the Temple; kept house at Islington; paid occasional