your

are now destined, perhaps, to wrap up spices. You see what mutation the busy hand of Time has produced, while you have consumed in foolish voluntary exile that time which might have gladdened friends—benefited your country; but reproaches are useless. Gather up the wretched reliques, my friend, as fast as you can, and come to your old home. I will rub my eyes and try to recognize you. We will shake withered hands together, and talk of old things-of St. Mary's church and the barber's opposite, where the young students in mathematics used to assemble. Poor Crisp, that kept it afterwards, set up a fruiterer's shop in Trumpington-street, and for aught I know resides there still, for I saw the name up in the last journey I took there with my sister just before she died. I suppose you heard that I had left the India House, and gone into the Fishmongers' Almshouses over the bridge. I have a little cabin there, small and homely; but you shall be welcome to it. You like oysters, and to open them yourself; I'll get you some if you come in oyster time. Marshall, Godwin's old friend, is still alive, and talks of the faces you used to make.

66

Come as soon as you can.

"C. LAMB."

Here is the next day's reverse of the picture.

TO MR. MANNING.

"Dec. 26th, 1815.

now

"Dear Manning,-Following your brother's example, I have just ventured one letter to Canton, and am hazarding another (not exactly a duplicate) to St. Helena. The first was full of unprobable romantic fictions, fitting the remoteness of the mission it goes upon; in the present I mean to confine myself nearer to truth as you come nearer home. A correspondence with the uttermost parts of the earth necessarily involves in it some heat of fancy; it sets the brain agoing; but I can think on the half-way house tranquilly. Your friends, then, are not all dead or grown forgetful of you through old age, as that lying letter

1 [Reminiscences of Cambridge.]

asserted, anticipating rather what must happen if you kept tarrying on for ever on the skirts of creation, as there seemed a danger of your doing-but they are all tolerably well and in full and perfect comprehension of what is meant by Manning's coming home again. Mrs. Kenney never let her tongue run riot more than in remembrances of you. Fanny' expends herself in phrases that can only be justified by her romantic nature. Mary reserves a portion of your silk, not to be buried in (as the false nuncio asserts), but to make up spick and span into a bran new gown to wear when you come. I am the same as when you knew me, almost to a surfeiting identity. This very night I am going to leave off tobacco! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised. The soul hath not her generous aspirings implanted in her in vain. One that you knew, and I think the only one of those friends we knew much of in common, has died in earnest. Poor Priscilla !2 Her brother Robert is also dead, and several of the grown-up brothers and sisters, in the compass of a very few years. Death has not otherwise meddled much in families that I know. Not but he has his horrid eye upon us, and is wetting his infernal feathered dart every instant, as you see him truly pictured in that impressive moral picture, 'The good man at the hour of death.' I have in trust to put in the post four letters from Diss, and one from Lynn, to St. Helena, which I hope will accompany this safe, and one from Lynn, and the one before spoken of from me, to Canton. But we all hope that these letters may be waste paper. I don't know why I have forborne writing so long. forlorn hope to send a scrap of paper straggling over wide oceans. And yet I know when you come home, I shall have you sitting before me at our fire-side just as if you had never been away. In such an instant does the return of a person dissipate all the weight of imaginary perplexity from distance of time and space! I'll promise you good oysters. Cory is dead, that kept the shop opposite St. Dunstan's, but the tougher materials of the shop survive the perishing frame of its keeper. Oysters continue to [Fanny Holcroft.]

But it is such a

2 [Priscilla Lloyd, who married Christopher Wordsworth.]

But

flourish there under as good auspices. Poor Cory! if you will absent yourself twenty years together, you must not expect numerically the same population to congratulate your return which wetted the sea-beach with their tears when you went away. Have you recovered the breathless stone-staring astonishment into which you must have been thrown upon learning at landing that an Emperor of France was living in St. Helena ? What an event in the

solitude of the seas! like finding a fish's bone at the top of Plinlimmon; but these things are nothing in our western world. Novelties cease to affect. Come and try what presence can.

"God bless you. Your old friend,

your

"C. LAMB."

'[Manning not only heard of Napoleon being there, but had an interview with him.]

CHAPTER XVI.

LAMB'S LIFE IN THE TEMPLE-THE WEDNESDAY EVENINGSHAZLITT, GODWIN, AND COLERIDGE-HAZLITT'S ACCOUNT OF THESE MEETINGS-LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, FIELD, COLLIER, ETC.-RHYMING EPISTLE TO AYRTON-CORRESPONDENCE WITH MR. CHAMBERS OF LEAMINGTON.

[1816-17.]

THE years which Lamb passed in his chambers in Inner Temple Lane were, perhaps, the happiest of his life. His salary was considerably augmented; his fame as an author was rapidly extending; he resided near the spot which he best loved, and was surrounded by a motley group of attached friends, some of them men of rarest parts, and all strongly attached to him and to his sister. Here the glory of his Wednesday nights shone forth in its greatest lustre. If you did not meet there the favourites of fortune authors whose works bore the highest price in Paternoster Row, and who glittered in the circles of fashion, you might find those who had thought most deeply, felt most keenly, and were destined to produce the most lasting influences on the literature and manners of the age.

There Hazlitt, sometimes kindling into fierce passion at any mention of the great reverses of his idol Napoleon, at other times bashfully enunciated the finest criticism on art, or dwelt with genial iteration on a passage in Chaucer; or, fresh from the theatre, expatiated on some new instance of energy in Kean, or reluctantly conceded a greatness to Kemble; or detected some popular fallacy with the fairest and the subtlest reasoning. There Godwin, as he played his quiet rubber, or benignantly joined in the gossip of the day, sat an object of curiosity and wonder to the stranger, who had been at one time shocked or charmed with his high speculation, and at another awe-struck by the force and graphic power of his novels.

2

There Coleridge sometimes, though rarely, took his seat; and then the genial hubbub of voices was still. Critics, philosophers, and poets, were contented to listen; and toilworn lawyers, clerks from the India House,' and members of the Stock Exchange, grew romantic while he spoke.3 Lamb used to say that he was inferior then to what he had been in his youth; but I can scarcely believe it; at least there is nothing in his early writing which gives any idea of the richness of his mind so lavishly poured out at this time in his happiest moods. Although he looked much older than he was, his hair being silvered all over, and his person tending to corpulency, there was about him no trace of bodily sickness or mental decay, but rather an air of voluptuous repose. His benignity of manner placed his auditors entirely at their ease, and inclined them to listen delighted to the sweet, low tone in which he began to discourse on some high theme. Whether he had won for his greedy listener only some raw lad, or charmed a circle of beauty, rank and wit, who hung breathless on his words, he talked with equal eloquence; for his subject, not his audience, inspired him. At first his tones were conversational; he seemed to dally with the shadows of the subject and with fantastic images which bordered it; but gradually the thought grew deeper, and the voice deepened with the thought. The stream, gathering strength, seemed to bear along with it all things which opposed its progress, and blended them with its current; and stretching away among

1

[Probably not many. Perhaps only Mr. Edward White, to whom there is a pleasant letter further on; Mr. William Evans, by whom Lamb and Talfourd were introduced to each other; and Mr. Ryle, afterwards one of his executors. John Hoole, whose version of Tasso came out in 1762 with a preface by his friend Dr. Johnson, was in the India House. See vol. i., p. 157. Johnson thought that Hoole's translation would supersede Fairfax. For notices of other colleagues of Lamb, see infra, p. 41.]

2

[Referring only, I think, to Mr. Thomas Allsop, the friend of Coleridge.]

3

[The only lady of whom I have heard as attending these evenings was Harriet Hazlitt, eldest daughter of the miniature painter, who told me in 1867, that she well remembered the room, hung round with Hogarths, in the Temple, and that she had, as a girl, to stand on a chair to look at them. She never met any other of her sex there. Charles Lamb gave her a copy of his "Tales from Shakespear."]