made out the last lines of the 'Epistle to enlisted on behalf of Hazlitt and Hunt, who Jervis,' between gay and tender,

which their infidelity brought on them, Mr. Southey thus proceeded :

The allusion in this paragraph was really, as Lamb was afterwards convinced, intended by Mr. Southey to assist the sale of the book. In haste, having expunged some word which he thought improper, he wrote, "sounder religious feeling," not satisfied with the epithet, but meaning to correct it in the proof, which unfortunately was never sent him. Lamb saw it on his return from a month's pleasant holidays at Hastings, and expressed his first impression respecting it in a letter.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

July 10th, 1823. "Dear Sir, I have just returned from Hastings, where are exquisite views and walks, and where I have given up my soul to walking, and I am now suffering sedentary contrasts. I am a long time reconciling to town after one of these excursions. Home is become strange, and will remain so yet a while; home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always resents absence; I know its old cordial look will return, but they are slow in clearing up. That is one of the features of this our galley-slavery, that

"Unbelievers have not always been honest enough thus to express their real feelings; but this we know concerning them, that when they have renounced their birthright of hope, they have not been able to divest themselves of fear. From the nature of the human mind, this might be presumed, and in fact it is so. They may deaden the heart and stupify the conscience, but they cannot destroy the imaginative faculty. There is a remarkable proof of this in 'Elia's Essays,' a book which wants only a sounder religious feeling, to be as delightful as it is original. In that upon 'Witches and the other Night Fears,' he says, 'It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children; they can at most but give them a direction. Dear little T. H., who of all children has been brought up with the most scrupulous exclusion of every taint of superstition, who was never allowed to hear of goblin or apparition, or scarcely to be told of bad men, or to hear or read of any distressing story, finds all this world of fear, from which he has been so peregrination ended makes things worse. I rigidly excluded ab extra, in his own "thickcoming fancies," and from his little midnight pillow this nurse child of optimism will start at shapes, unborrowed of tradition, in sweats to which the reveries of the well-damned murderer are tranquillity.'-This poor child, instead of being trained up in the way he should go, had been bred in the ways of modern philosophy; he had systematically been prevented from knowing anything of that Saviour who said, 'Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven ;' care had been taken that he should not pray to God, nor lie down at night in reliance upon his good providence ! Nor let it be supposed that terrors of imagination belong to childhood alone. The reprobate heart, which has discarded all love of God, cannot so easily rid itself of the fear of the devil; and even when it succeeds in that also, it will then create a hell for itself. We have heard of unbelievers who thought it probable that they should be awake in their graves; and this was the opinion for which they had exchanged a worship. Christian's hope of immortality!"

felt out of water (with all the sea about me) at Hastings; and just as I had learned to domiciliate there, I must come back to find a home which is no home. I abused Hastings, but learned its value. There are spots, inland bays, &c., which realise the notions of Juan Fernandez. The best thing I lit upon by accident was a small country church, (by whom or when built unknown,) standing bare and single in the midst of a grove, with no house or appearance of habitation within a quarter of a mile, only passages diverging from it through beautiful woods to so many farm-houses. There it stands like the first idea of a church, before parishioners were thought of, nothing but birds for its congregation; or like a hermit's oratory (the hermit dead), or a mausoleum; its effect singularly impressive, like a church found in a desert isle to startle Crusoe with a home image; you must make out a vicar and a congregation from fancy, for surely none come there; yet it wants not its pulpit, and its font, and all its seemly additaments of our

"Southey has attacked 'Elia' on the score

"I heard of you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my laziness, which has been intolerable; but I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite

of infidelity, in the Quarterly article,' Progress of Infidelity.' I had not, nor have seen the Monthly. He might have spared an old friend such a construction of a few careless flights, that meant no harm to religion. If a new sort of occupation to me. I have all his unguarded expressions on the subject were to be collected-but I love and respect Southey, and will not retort. I hate his review, and his being a reviewer. The hint he has dropped will knock the sale of the book on the head, which was almost at a stop before. Let it stop,-there is corn in Egypt, while there is cash at Leadenhall! You and I are something besides being writers, thank God!

"September 2nd, 1823. "Dear B. B.,-What will you not say for my not writing? You cannot say, I do not write now. When you come London-ward, you will find me no longer in Covent Garden; I have a cottage, in Colebrook Row, Islington; a cottage, for it is detached; a white house, with six good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old books; and above is a lightsome drawing-room, three windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a great lord, never having had a house before.

"The 'London,' I fear, falls off. I linger among its creaking rafters, like the last rat; it will topple down if they don't get some buttresses. They have pulled down three; Hazlitt, Procter, and their best stay, kind, light-hearted Wainwright, their Janus. The best is, neither of our fortunes is concerned in it.

gathered my jargonels, but my Windsor pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what sense they speak of father Adam. I recognise the paternity, while I watch my tulips. I almost fell with him, for the first day I turned a drunken gardener (as he let in the serpent) into my Eden, and he laid about him, lopping off some choice boughs, &c., which hung over from a neighbour's garden, and in his blind zeal laid waste a shade, which had sheltered their window from the gaze of passers-by. The old gentlewoman (fury made her not handsome) could scarcely be reconciled by all my fine words. There was no buttering her parsnips. She talked of the law. What a lapse to commit on the first day of my happy' garden-state!'

"I hope you transmitted the Fox-Journal to its owner, with suitable thanks. Mr. Cary, the Dante-man, dines with me to-day. He is a model of a country parson, lean (as a curate ought to be), modest, sensible, no obtruder of church dogmas, quite a different man from

You would like him. Pray accept this for a letter, and believe me, with sincere regards, Yours, C. L."

In the next letter to Barton, Lamb referred to an intended letter to Southey in the Magazine.

TO BERNARD BARTON.

"September 17th, 1823. "Dear Sir,-I have again been reading your Stanzas on Bloomfield,' which are the most appropriate that can be imagined,— sweet with Doric delicacy. I like that,―

'Our own more chaste Theocritus'

just hinting at the fault of the Grecian. I
love that stanza ending with,

"Words, phrases, fashions, pass away;
But truth and nature live through all.'

But I shall omit in my own copy the one

stanza which alludes to Lord B. I suppose. It spoils the sweetness and oneness of the feeling. Cannot we think of Burns, or Thomson, without sullying the thought with a reflection out of place upon Lord Rochester ? These verses might have been inscribed upon a tomb; are in fact an epitaph; satire does not look pretty upon a tomb-stone. Besides, there is a quotation in it, always bad in verse, seldom advisable in prose. I doubt if their having been in a paper will not prevent T. and H. from insertion, but I shall have a thing to send in a day or two, and shall try them. Omitting that stanza, a very little alteration is wanting in the beginning of the next. You see, I use freedom. How happily, (I flatter not) you have brought in his subjects; and (I suppose) his favourite measure, though I am not acquainted with any of his writings but the 'Farmer's Boy.' He dined with me once, and his manners took me exceedingly.

"I rejoice that you forgive my long silence. I continue to estimate my own-roof comforts highly. How could I remain all my life a lodger? My garden thrives (I am told), though I have yet reaped nothing but some tiny salad, and withered carrots. But a garden's a garden anywhere, and twice a garden in London.

"Do you go on with your 'Quaker Sonnets?' have 'em ready with 'Southey's Book of the Church.' I meditate a letter to S. in. the 'London,' which perhaps will meet the fate of the Sonnet.

"Excuse my brevity, for I write painfully at office, liable to a hundred callings off; and I can never sit down to an epistle elsewhere. I read or walk. If you return this letter to the Post-office, I think they will return fourpence, seeing it is but half a one. Believe me, though, C. L."

Entirely yours,

The contemplated expostulation with Southey was written, and appeared in the "London Magazine for October 1823." Lamb did not print it in any subsequent collection of his essays; but I give it now, as I have reason to know that its publication will cause no painful feelings in the mind of Mr. Southey, and as it forms the only ripple on the kindliness of Lamb's personal and literary life.

LETTER OF ELIA TO ROBERT SOUTHEY, ESQ. "Sir,-You have done me an unfriendly office, without perhaps much considering what you were doing. You have given an ill name to my poor lucubrations. In a recent paper on Infidelity, you usher in a conditional commendation of them with an exception: which, preceding the encomium, and taking up nearly the same space with it, must impress your readers with the notion, that the objectionable parts in them are at least equal in quantity to the pardonable. The censure is in fact the criticism; the praisea concession merely. Exceptions usually follow, to qualify praise or blame. But there stands your reproof, in the very front of your notice, in ugly characters, like some bugbear, to frighten all good Christians from purchasing. Through you I become an object of suspicion to preceptors of youth, and fathers of families. A book, which wants only a sounder religious feeling to be as delightful as it is original. With no further explanation, what must your readers conjecture, but that my little volume is some vehicle for heresy or infidelity? The quotation, which you honour me by subjoining, oddly enough, is of a character which bespeaks a temperament in the writer the very reverse of that your reproof goes to insinuate. Had you been taxing me with superstition, the passage would have been pertinent to the censure. Was it worth your while to go so far out of your way to affront the feelings of an old friend, and commit yourself by an irrelevant quotation, for the pleasure of reflecting upon a poor child, an exile at Genoa?

"I am at a loss what particular essay you had in view (if my poor ramblings amount to that appellation) when you were in such a hurry to thrust in your objection, like bad news, foremost.-Perhaps the paper on 'Saying Graces' was the obnoxious feature. I have endeavoured there to rescue a voluntary duty-good in place, but never, as I remember, literally commanded-from the charge of an undecent formality. Rightly taken, sir, that paper was not against graces, but want of grace; not against the ceremony, but the carelessness and slovenliness so often observed in the performance of it.

"Or was it that on the 'New Year'-in which I have described the feelings of the

merely natural man, on a consideration of the amazing change, which is supposable to take place on our removal from this fleshly scene? If men would honestly confess their misgivings (which few men will) there are times when the strongest Christian of us, I believe, has reeled under questions of such staggering obscurity. I do not accuse you of this weakness. There are some who tremblingly reach out shaking hands to the guidance of Faith -others who stoutly venture into the dark (their Human Confidence their leader, whom they mistake for Faith); and, investing themselves beforehand with cherubic wings, as they fancy, find their new robes as familiar, and fitting to their supposed growth and stature in godliness, as the coat they left off yesterday-some whose hope totters upon crutches-others who stalk into futurity upon

stilts.

to be desperate. Others (with stronger optics), as plainly as with the eye of flesh, shall behold a given king in bliss, and a given chamberlain in torment; even to the eternising of a cast of the eye in the latter, his own self-mocked and good-humouredly-borne deformity on earth, but supposed to aggravate the uncouth and hideous expression of his pangs in the other place. That one man can presume so far, and that another would with shuddering disclaim such confidences, is, I believe, an effect of the nerves purely.

"If in either of these papers, or elsewhere, I have been betrayed into some levities-not affronting the sanctuary, but glancing perhaps at some of the outskirts and extreme edges, the debateable land between the holy and profane regions-(for the admixture of man's inventions, twisting themselves with the name of the religion itself, has artfully made it "The contemplation of a Spiritual World, difficult to touch even the alloy, without, in -which, without the addition of a misgiving some men's estimation, soiling the fine gold) conscience, is enough to shake some natures-if I have sported within the purlieus of to their foundation-is smoothly got over by serious matter-it was, I dare say, a humour others, who shall float over the black billows-be not startled, sir,-which I have unwitin their little boat of No-Distrust, as unconcernedly as over a summer sea. The difference is chiefly constitutional.

"One man shall love his friends and his friends' faces; and, under the uncertainty of conversing with them again, in the same manner and familiar circumstances of sight, speech, &c. as upon earth-in a moment of no irreverent weakness-for a dream-whileno more-would be almost content, for a reward of a life of virtue (if he could ascribe such acceptance to his lame performances), to take up his portion with those he loved, and was made to love, in this good world, which he knows-which was created so lovely, beyond his deservings. Another, embracing a more exalted vision-so that he might receive indefinite additaments of power, knowledge, beauty, glory, &c.—is ready to forego the recognition of humbler individualities of earth, and the old familiar faces. The shapings of our heavens are the modifications of our constitution; and Mr. Feeble Mind, or Mr. Great Heart, is born in every

one of us.

"Some (and such have been accounted the safest divines) have shrunk from pronouncing upon the final state of any man; nor dare they pronounce the case of Judas

tingly derived from yourself. You have all your life been making a jest of the Devil. Not of the scriptural meaning of that dark essence-personal or allegorical; for the nature is nowhere plainly delivered. I acquit you of intentional irreverence. But indeed you have made wonderfully free with, and been mighty pleasant upon, the popular idea and attributes of him. A Noble Lord, your brother Visionary, has scarcely taken greater liberties with the material keys, and merely Catholic notion of St. Peter. You have flattered him in prose: you have chanted him in goodly odes. You have been his Jester; volunteer Laureat, and self-elected Court Poet to Beelzebub.

"You have never ridiculed, I believe, what you thought to be religion, but you are always girding at what some pious, but perhaps mistaken folks, think to be so. For this reason I am sorry to hear, that you are engaged upon a life of George Fox. I know you will fall into the error of intermixing some comic stuff with your seriousness. The Quakers tremble at the subject in your hands. The Methodists are shy of you, upon account of their founder. But, above all, our Popish brethren are most in your debt. The errors of that Church have proved a fruitful source