endanger his health. Now he made up well for lost time, not being content with the ordinary standard. Myconius himself was little more than a Latin scholar, but Platter took up Greek and Hebrew. The shifts he had to be at to learn even the elements of these languages may well astound our luxurious literati. His old master had an assistant named Bibliander who was author of a Hebrew grammar. Thomas used to get up early and copy out this book before Bibliander was awake, and the learned author never found out the liberty thus taken. His mother dying, he came into a small inheritance, of which the last crown went for a Hebrew Bible, that by rare chance was offered cheap to any poor scholar. In Hebrew, under such difficulties, he made so good progress as soon to find employment in instructing some of the country clergy, among whom the Reformation had begotten a new demand for learning.

Our hero's next essay seems a strange one: following the example of another student, he learned rope-making, and took a place at Basle with a master who had such a bad name for ill-temper that he could hardly get journeymen to stay with him. Thomas had much to put up with here, but his love of learning sustained him. Every spare moment, at night, on holidays, he spent over such books as he could procure, his master alternately scolding and laughing at him. He used to fix unbound sheets of Plautus in a little wooden fork, sticking this in the hemp on which he was working, that he might read while he twisted it; then if his master came by, he would throw the hemp over the telltale paper as another scholar might do to hide some idle trick. In this place he made acquaintance with several scholars: the famous Erasmus himself came to him one day when he was working at a great rope. As a ropemaker's journeyman he began to teach Hebrew, his welldressed pupils rather staring at the shabby appearance of their professor. Withal, he assures us that he mastered the ropemaking craft, being able to act as foreman after six months' practice. We can understand that whatever such a man's hand found to do, he would do it with all his might.

The religious civil wars between Zurich and the Five Cantons came to interrupt this way of life. Thomas, destined to try many trades, took the field as armour-bearer to his master, but confesses he had no taste for fighting, though he seems to have been ready enough to do his duty with the rest upon occasion.

PEACE AND PROSPERITY.

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He next became a country schoolmaster for a bit, dealing in wine, too, and in apples, which his wife sold to the boys. For at this period he married, and thus turned his back upon all prospect of becoming a priest. Master Zwingle had given the word that there were too many priests in the land, that boys should rather be trained to live by work.

After such vicissitudes, our hero's fortunes are now not far from smooth water. He returned to Basle with Myconius, appointed Protestant preacher there. Thomas became by turns doctor's assistant, corrector of the press, master-printer and professor. At last he settled down as head of the school of Basle, a post for which he must have been well qualified, as far as a large and varied experience of school life went. He spent the rest of his days peacefully, accumulated some property, even got to have debts, which in a certain way bespeak some measure of prosperity, gained the respect of his fellow citizens, and died in 1582 at a good old age.

In his seventy-third year he wrote, for the benefit of his son Felix, an autobiography, whence this young gentleman, as we may do, might learn to contrast his own advantages with the hard youthful struggle through which his father had at length worked a way up to learning, honour, and usefulness. What better can a man desire? Had this man ever hoped as much, when shivering and starving in the service of those bully Bacchants, he as yet knew too little of the world or of letters to assure himself, Hæc olim meminisse juvabit! Were he alive now, he would find things greatly changed for the better in his native land, which has taken a lead among European nations in providing for popular instruction. In some cantons of Switzerland, grown men are forced to attend school, if their acquirements be not up to the legal standard; and that very Frauenmunster school at Zurich, where Thomas Platter applied himself so laboriously to learn Latin, now contains a museum for the exhibition of the best scholastic systems and apparatus, such as gave him little enough help along his painful path to scholarship.

I.

WAS born, and passed the first seven years of my life, in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said -for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ?-these are of my oldest recollections. I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot:

"There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
There whylome wont the Templer knights to bide
Till they decayed through pride.'

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first timethe passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses! What a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden; that goodly pile

"Of building strong, albeit of Paper height,'

confronting with massy contrast the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one, named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown-Office Row (place of my kindly engendure), right oppo

site the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials, with their moral inscriptions, seeming coëval with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!"

Thus writes Charles Lamb in one of the many autobiographical fragments scattered through the Essays of Elia. The story of his boyhood is here to be told as far as possible in his own words, so that the reader who comes to these pages seeking oysters shall find pearls. The task of the present writer is but to string together reminiscences, half-imaginative as they may sometimes be, which are almost the only materials we have for the early life of this best known and most loved of all Blue-Coat boys.

Though Lamb's childhood was spent in such a stately scene, he belonged to a humble enough family, if any one could think of such considerations in connection with him. "To have the feelings of gentility," as he truly says, "it is not necessary to have been born gentle," and he well carried out the promise of that characteristically sportive allusion to his own patronymic, which he of all men could not but pun upon,

"No deed of mine shall shame thee, gentle name !"

His father had been a poor boy from Lincoln, who rose to be clerk to one of the benchers of the Temple-confidential friend and faithful servant in one. He had a comfortable place, and that was all. "Snug firesides, the low-built roof, parlours ten feet by ten, frugal boards, and all the homeliness of home-these were the condition of my birth, the wholesome soil which I was planted in."

In this way our Charles came to be born in the heart of London, which, all his life, he loved as the Lakesman loves his mountains, and the Yorkshireman his moors. Yet in childhood

he had some experiences of country life along with occasional peeps at "the contrasting accidents of a great fortune." His grandmother was housekeeper at a large country-house in Hertfordshire, her position being an as exceptionally favourable one as that of Lamb's father with his master; the family did not reside there, so that she was practically mistress of the place, trusted by her employers and respected by the neighbours. She used to have her grandsons to stay with her; and the wonders of the old deserted mansion made no less impression on Charles's mind than the stately terraces and gardens of the Temple. It is this house on which, under the name of Blakesmoor, he dwells so affectionately in the "Essays of Elia," recalling pictures of its faded splendour, interwoven with memories of his worthy grandmother and his elder brother John.

"I told how good she was to all her grandchildren, having us to the great house in the holidays, where I in particular used to spend many hours by myself, in gazing upon the old busts of the twelve Cæsars, that had been Emperors of Rome, till the old marble heads would seem to live again, or I to be turned into marble with them; how I never could be tired with roaming about that huge mansion, with its vast empty rooms, with their worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry, and carved oaken panels, with the gilding almost rubbed out-sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then,—and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholylooking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir-apples, which were good for nothing but to look at -or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me-or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth-or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings,—I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavours of peaches, nectarines, oranges,