nature.

We mourn over his sorrows; we feel the bitterness of his fate; we are ready to weep with him over the loss of his dearest friends, and the blight of his fondest hopes; and we deeply lament that the consolations of Christianity could not be offered to his noble spirit. But we still thank God for this bright example of the dignity, power, and glory of our nature; for the virtues which sprang from no teaching; for the far-reaching views, and the sublime aspirations, for the brightness which one noble mind, from its own fountain of light, was able to shed on the night of paganism.

ART. III. The Letters of CHARLES LAMB, with a Sketch of his Life. By THOMAS NOON TALFOURD, One of his Executors. In Two Volumes. London; Edward Moxon, Dover Street. 1837.

MR. TALFOURD will receive the thanks of all lovers of Charles Lamb's exquisite genius, for this timely contribution to our knowledge of his character and private life. Himself a poet of commanding fame; the most successful tragic writer of the age; a brilliant orator, a great lawyer, a leading statesman; he has gracefully stepped aside from his brilliant path of renown, to scatter a few fragrant flowers upon the grave of his departed friend. Amidst the press of manifold and exacting avocations, he has found time to execute, with the warmth of heartfelt enthusiasın, the task which love and reverence of Lamb's rare intellectual endowments induced him to accept.

The thread of narrative, which runs through these volumes like a thread of gold in a tissue of embroidery, is all that the most fastidious taste can require. In the exquisite selection of words, in the melodious construction of sentences, in the ornamental work of a rich and gorgeous imagination, Mr. Talfourd's pure style is unsurpassed. The few and almost unimportant events of Lamb's life are delightfully told, and the occasional notices of his friends and contemporaries are conceived and expressed in a spirit of cordial sympathy with all that is excellent and admirable in every variety of genius. This trait is carried almost to a faulty excess. Mr. Talfourd's praise is too indiscriminately lavished on all the members of

that coterie of poets, of which Coleridge and Wordsworth were the most distinguished ornaments. The genius and influence of these two celebrated men he has overrated; their faults he has disguised under the drapery of most enchanting eulogy. He has also exaggerated, in many respects, the literary abilities of Lamb. Led by a pardonable partiality for his lamented friend, he has assigned him a higher rank among the great writers of his age than any, except a small circle of his contemporaries, have allowed, and certainly much higher than posterity will concede.

The truth is, Lamb was a singularly imperfect man. His peculiar genius was the strange product of a highly artificial state of society. He was made up of whims and humors, that could only be developed in the midst of a great capital. London was his paradise. The shops and streets, the lights and crowds of that vast metropolis, afforded perpetual excitement to his fantastic thoughts. With the beauties of rural nature he had little or no sympathy. Like Leigh Hunt, he felt that a great mountain was a great impostor. The snugness and comforts of city apartments were essential to his existence. In these respects he was a thorough cockney. He carried his metropolitan partialities to as absurd an extreme, as his friend Wordsworth his love of rustic simplicity. With such narrow and one-sided feelings, Charles Lamb was not the man to sympathize with the great philanthropic schemes of the age. He clung with invincible tenacity to every thing near him; he had no care to spend on objects or interests that had no bearing on his personal welfare. The vast political topics, which have agitated the minds of men for the last fifty years, passed over him like the idle wind, which he regarded not. But his indifference to them was not the growth of a sublime philosophy, in whose comprehensive view the fleeting interests of an age are reduced to their just proportions in the great picture of human affairs. He was incapable of travelling beyond the narrow sphere in which he lived, and moved, and had his being. He was in the habit of doing systematic and gross injustice to the charitable schemes of humane men to soften the ills of poverty, and bestow the blessings of religion on the benighted; and yet he was personally the most amiable of men, and spared no pains or expense to relieve a miserable object, who had once attracted his regard.

The place which Lamb holds in English literature, is altogether unique and peculiar; but the sphere of his excellence is limited. In the first place, he was no poet. The pieces of verse published in his works, with one or two exceptions, are below mediocrity. His mind was too whimsical for sustained beauty, within the severe limitations of poetry. It was ever wandering into some fantastic train of thought; some out-ofthe-way analogy, unfit for the serious muse. He had but little dramatic talent; his attempts in the theatrical way proved signal and disastrous failures. Indeed, it is plain enough, that to conceive and represent a character dramatically, requires a steadiness of intellect, a firmness of purpose, a power of changing places with imaginary personages, which never belonged to Charles Lamb. His imagination laid hold of oddities of character with wonderful readiness; and he described, not represented, them with truth and wit. But he did not, and could not, bring a consistent being, with the attributes of humanity, before us, and exhibit it in all the varieties of action and passion. Even his farce of "Mr. H." is the most undramatic and extravagant of farces. The joke is too hard pressed, and long drawn, to be thoroughly enjoyed even in the closet. His play of "John Woodville" has a few fine poetical passages, and some happy imitations of old English dramatists; but it shows little originality, and no talent for the stage.

But in his own walk he was unrivalled. The short, humorous essay he carried to a point of excellence never before attained. His style is ever happy and original; his wit, of the rarest and most pungent description. The native peculiarities of his mind appear, fresh, racy, and delightful. The love of quaint conceits, which was a part of his nature, was increased by his enthusiastic study of the early English authors, who furnished his mind with its most genial sustenance; and his easy flow of expression and pithy language received a certain antique coloring from the same source. His wit, clothed in this curious garb, comes upon the mind with the most irresistible effect. We regard it as something singular, something remote from every thing else within our knowledge, and yet wholly free from affectation. His mind sympathized so completely with his favorite writers, that he became almost their contemporary, and poured out his rich drollery in their quaint ex

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pressions, with the same natural gush of imagination and whim, as they would have done themselves. It is not easy to say in what his wit mainly consists. Certainly it does not depend for its effect upon single brilliant sallies; upon pointed antithesis; upon repartee. It is rather a quality, a flavor, with which all his thoughts and images are impregnated. It is the concentrated fragrance of a thousand scattered perfumes. The senses are delighted with the united sweets, but the several ingredients escape the minutest analysis. If we say that his perception of the ludicrous is his strongest point, we speedily find ourselves in the wrong. Others have this power to a greater extent than he, without a millionth part of his wit. He is constantly punning; but that is not the secret. Some of his puns are more execrable than any that have been perpetrated in Philadelphia. Mr. Talfourd has printed some at the end of his second volume, which sound almost idiotic. His wit is not the perception of ludicrous images; it is not a play upon words; it is not the sudden exhibition of unexpected relations; but it is something wholly inseparable from the texture of his mind, and his habits of association, and assuming all the outward forms, of which language is capable. It is a subtile spirit, pervading all his writings, and reaching the reader's mind by a thousand different avenues. We can neither seize it nor escape from it.

The literary opinions of Lamb must generally be severely scrutinized. Neither his moral nor intellectual qualities were such as fitted him to be a catholic judge of other men's productions. Several of his criticisms are exquisitely conceived and expressed. His remarks on Shakspeare's Othello are admirable, but not philosophical or profound. But his elaborate defence of the dissolute drama of Charles the Second's time is an astounding absurdity. It shows an incapacity of judging of the demoralizing power, which a depraved literature exercises upon the lowest passions of our nature, which we should wonder at in a child, or else a moral insensibility to the disastrous consequences of that power, almost miraculous. His ridicule of the moral precision of our age, in relation to that most licentious school of writers, falls harmless to the ground. The age is right, only that it does not go far enough in its reprobation of dissolute literature; and Lamb is wrong, utterly wrong. His opinions upon this point will take a high place on the long list of the absurdities of literary men. The

same singular perversion of taste is shown in many of his selections from the dramatists. Several scenes, taken from those authors, avowedly for their rare beauty of thought and expression, are such as no man would choose to let his sister or daughter read; such as no man of decency would put into a woman's hand, unless he wished to be excluded from respectable society. Obscenity is just as bad in an old English drama as in a modern French novel. Filth is filth wherever it is found, and no glittering paradox can remove its native deformity. But many of the opinions which he expressed in his letters, on the literary merits of his contemporaries, are singularly clear and correct. In his correspondence with Coleridge, the bombastic absurdities, and the cloudy vagaries of that over-estimated writer, are handled without ceremony; and some of the admirers of Coleridge will be astonished at the boldness, with which Lamb ridicules his false brilliancy and oracular mysticism. The same freedom he used with the frequent tediousness and commonplace platitudes of Southey.

Turning from the literary character of Lamb, to his private life, as exhibited in these volumes, we find it marked by as strong peculiarities as his writings. Though indifferent, as we have said, to the benevolent projects of the day, his affections for those about him were strong and tender. The amiable qualities of his heart endeared him to many, not only of different but of opposite characters. He had a strange facility in passing over the disagreeable things in his associates, and fastening only on those traits which pleased him. This was partly owing to his indifference to great principles of action, and his dislike of change and agitation. He was consequently surrounded by people, whose voices must have occasionally produced a strange discord, that all the gentleness of his nature could scarcely hush. But the most pleasing trait in his private life, is the extraordinary love he bore his sister. She had taken care of his sickly infancy, and in return, he devoted the flower of his life to her comfort and happiness. He abstained from forming any other and closer ties, that he might bestow his undivided care upon the companion of his childhood. How well that high duty was performed, and how justly this beautiful part of his chequered character was appreciated by his friends, is feelingly shown in Sergeant Talfourd's volumes, to which we must now turn our readers' attention.