which was concluded in 1828. These volumes did not sell well, but in 1830 Rogers reissued Italy with magnificent plates by Turner, and in 1834 his poems in two volumes. On these ventures he expended £14,000, but the sales were so large that the entire sum was refunded to him. His pride was to know "everybody," and he lived so long that the man who had called on Dr. Johnson was able to give his blessing to Mr. Algernon Swinburne. In 1850 he was offered the Poet Laureateship, but refused it on the score of age, yet he lived on until the 18th of December 1855. 66 "Boy, call the gondola ; the sun is set." It came, and we embarked; but instantly, With her loose tresses, and drew more and more That rosy mouth, that cheek dimpled with smiles, I looked and looked, and felt a flush of joy I would express but cannot. Oft I wished Gently-by stealth-to drop asleep myself, And to incline yet lower that sleep might come; Oft closed my eyes as in forgetfulness. 'Twas all in vain. Love would not let me rest. The other revenant, GEORGE CRABBE, did better. After a silence almost unbroken for two-and-twenty years, he resumed his sturdy rhyming in 1807, and in 1810 enriched the language with a poem of really solid merit, the Borough, a picture of social and physical conditions in a seaside town on the Eastern Coast. Crabbe never excelled, perhaps never equalled, this saturnine study of the miseries of provincial life; like his own watchman, the poet seems to have no other design than to "let in truth, terror, and the day." Crabbe was essentially a writer of the eighteenth century, bound close by the versification of Churchill and those who, looking past Pope, tried to revive the vehement music of Dryden; his attitude to life and experience, too, was of the age of 1780. Yet he showed the influence of romanticism and of his contemporaries in the exactitude of his natural observation and his Dutch niceness in the choice of nouns. He avoided, almost as carefully as Wordsworth himself, the vague sonorous synonym which continues the sound while adding nothing to the sense. As Tenny Lamb son used to say, "Crabbe has a world of his own," and his plain, strong, unaffected poetry will always retain a certain number of admirers. This second generation of romanticism was marked by a development of critical writing which was of the very highest importance. It may indeed. be said, without much exaggeration, that at this time literary criticism, in the modern sense, was first seriously exercised in England. In other words, the old pseudo-classic philosophy of literature, founded on the misinterpretation of Aristotle, was completely obsolete; while the rude, positive expression of baseless opinion with which the Edinburgh and the Quarterly had started, had broken down, leaving room for a new sensitive criticism founded on comparison with ancient and exotic types of style, a sympathetic study of nature, and a genuine desire to appreciate the writer's contribution on its own merits. Of this new and fertile school of critics, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, and Lamb were the leaders. It is noticeable that the utterances of these writers which have made their names famous were, as a rule, written on occasion, and in consequence of an opportunity which came seldom and as a rule came late. Leigh Hunt's best work in criticism dates from 1808 until 1840 indeed, but only because during those years he possessed or influenced successive journals in which he was free to speak his mind. WILLIAM HAZLITT, on the other hand, was thirty-five years of age before his introduction to the Edinburgh Review enabled him in 1814 to begin his articles on the English comic writers. To the accident that Hazlitt was invited to lecture at the Surrey Institution we owe his English Poets and his essays on Elizabethan literature. Lamb and De Quincey found little vehicle for their ideas until the periodical called The London Magazine was issued in 1820; here the Essays of Elia and the Opium-Eater were published, and here lesser writers, and later Carlyle himself with his Life and Writings of Schiller, found a sympathetic asylum. It was therefore to the development and the increased refinement of periodical literature that the new criticism was most indebted, and newspapers of a comparatively humble order, without wealth or influence behind them, did that for literature which the great Quarterly Reviews, with their insolence and their sciolism, had conspicuously failed to achieve. With the definite analysis of literary productions we combine here, as being closely allied to it, the criticism of life contributed by all these essayists, but pre-eminently by CHARLES LAMB. This, perhaps the most beloved of English authors, with all his sufferings bravely borne, his long-drawn sorrows made light of in a fantastic jest, was the associate of the Lake poets at the outset of their career. He accepted their principles although he wholly lacked their exaltation in the presence of nature, and was essentially an urban, not a rural talent, though the tale of Rosamund Gray may seem to belie the judgment. The poetry of his youth was not very successful, and in the first decade of the century Lamb sank to contributing facetious ana to the newspapers at sixpence a joke. His delicate Tales from Shakespeare and the Specimens of 1808, of which we have already spoken, kept his memory before the minds of his friends, and helped to bring in a new era of thought by influencing a few young minds. Meanwhile he was sending to certain fortunate correspondents those divine epistles which, since their publication in 1837, have placed Lamb in the front rank of English letter-writers. But still he was unknown, and remained so until the young publisher Ollier was persuaded to venture on a collection of Lamb's scattered writings. At last, at the age of forty-five, he began to immortalise himself with those Essays of Elia, of which the opening series was ultimately given to the world as a volume in 1823. Charles Lamb (1775-1834) was the youngest of the seven children of John Lamb, the confidential servant of one of the Benchers of the Inner Temple, and was born on the 10th of February 1775, in Crown Office Row. "I was born," says Lamb, "and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its fountains, its river-these are of my oldest recollections." In 1782 he entered Christ's Hospital, and remained there until 1789; at the same school was "a poor friendless boy," called S. T. Coleridge, with whom Lamb formed a lifelong friendship. Of his six brothers and sisters only two now survivedJohn and Mary, both much older than Charles. About 1792 the latter obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, and was presently promoted to be a clerk in the accountant's office of the India House. In 1796 Mary Lamb (1764-1847), whose mental health had given cause for anxiety, went mad and stabbed their mother to death at the dinner-table. Charles was appointed her guardian, and for the rest of his life he devoted himself to her care. Four sonnets by Lamb ("C. L.") were included in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects (1796), and the romance of Rosamund Gray appeared in 1798. In the spring of 1799 Lamb's aged father died, and, Mary having partly recovered, the solitary pair occupied lodgings in Pentonville. From these they were ejected in 1800, but found shelter in a set of three rooms in Southampton Buildings, Holborn. Hence they moved to Mitre Court Buildings, in the Temple, where they lived very noiselessly until 1809, when they removed to Inner Temple Lane. The poetical drama called John Woodvil was printed in 1802; and poverty soon forced Charles to become in 1803-4 a contributor of puns and squibs to the Morning Post. In 1806 his farce of Mr. H. was acted with ignominious want of success at Drury Lane. Charles and Mary Charles Lamb After the Portrait by Robert Hancock ! continued to produce their Tales from Shakespeare and Mrs. Leicester's School in 1807, and for the first time tasted something like popularity. The Adventures of Ulysses followed in 1808, and the more important Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets. The next nine years, spent in Inner Temple Lane, were not eventful; Charles wrote little and published less; the poverty of the pair was not so pressing as it had been, but the malady of Mary recurred with distressing frequency. However, as Charles said in 1815, "the wind was tempered to the shorn Lambs," and on the whole they seem to have been happy. In 1817 they left the Temple and took a lodging in Russell Street, Covent Garden, on the site of Will's CoffeeHouse. A TALE OF ROSAMUND GRAY AND Old Blind Margaret. BY CHARLES LAMB. Charles collected his Works in two volumes in 1818, and this date closes the earlier and less distinguished half of his career. In 1820 the foundation of The London Magazine offered Lamb an opportunity for the free exercise of his characteristic humour and philosophy, and in the month of August he began to contribute essays to it. By 1823 so many of these easy, desultory articles had appeared that a volume was made of them, entitled Elia (pronounced "Ellia"); this is now usually spoken of as the Essays of Elia. This delightful book was received with at chorus of prise. Charles Lamb was now more prosperous, and his sister and he dared for the first time to take a house of their own, a cottage in Colebrook Row, Islington, and they adopted a charming little girl, Emma Isola, who brightened their lonely fireside. Charles had long fretted under the bondage of his work at the India House, where he had now served thirty-three years. The Directors met his wishes with marked generosity, and he retired on the very handHe wrote to some pension of £450 a year. Wordsworth on the 6th of April 1825: "I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week," and "it was like passing from life into eternity." It is doubtful, however, whether the sudden abandonment of all regular employment was good for Lamb; but in 1826 he worked almost daily at the British Museum, which kept him in health. In 1830 he published a volume of Album Verses, soon after boarding. with a family at Enfield. A final change of residence was made to Bay Cottage, Edmonton, in 1833; in this year the Last Essays of Elia were published, and the loneliness of the ageing brother and sister was enhanced by the marriage of Emina Isola. The death of Coleridge greatly affected Charles Lamb, who was now in failing health; he wrote of Coleridge, "his great and dear spirit haunts me," and he did not long survive. Charles Lamb died at Edmonton on the 27th of December 1834, with the names of the friends he had loved best murmured LONDON, PRINTED FOR LEE AND HURST, 1798. Title-page of the First Edition of Lamb's |