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ters the solicitude with which she had watched over his infancy. To her, from the age of twenty-one, he devoted his existence, seeking thenceforth no connexion which could interfere with her supremacy in his affections, or impair his ability to sustain and to comfort her." Mr. Coleridge speaks of Miss Lamb, to whom he continued greatly attached, in these verses addressed to her brother:

66 Cheerily, dear Charles!

Thou thy best friend shalt cherish many a year;
Such warm presages feel I of high hope!
For not uninterested the dear maid

I've viewed-her soul affectionate yet wise,
Her polished wit as mild as lambent glories
That play around a sainted infant's head."

(See the single volume of Coleridge's poems.)

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Mr. Lamb has himself described his dear and only sister, whose proper name is Mary Anne, under the title of "Cousin Bridget," in the Essay called Mackery End, a continuation of that entitled My Relations, in which he has drawn the portrait of his elder brother. Bridget Elia," so he commences the former, "has been my housekeeper for many a long year. I have obligations to Bridget extending beyond the period of memory. We house together old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness; with such tolerable comfort upon the whole, that I, for one, find in myself no sort of disposition to go out upon the mountain, with the rash king's offspring, to bewail my celibacy."-(Works, vol. ii., p. 171.) He describes her intellectual tastes in this essay, but does not refer to her literary abilities. She wrote Mrs. Leicester's School, which Mr. C. used warmly to praise for delicacy of taste and tenderness of feeling.

Miss Lamb still survives,* in the words of Mr. Talfourd, "to mourn the severance of a life-long association, as free from every alloy of selfishness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister." I have felt desirous to place in relief, as far as might be, such an interesting union-to show how blest a fraternal marriage may be, and what sufficient helpmates a brother and sister have been to each other. Marriages of this kind would be more frequent but for the want of some pledge or solid warranty of continuance equivalent to that which rivets wedlock between husband and wife. Without the vow and the bond, formal or virtual, no society, from the least to the greatest, will hold together. Many persons are so constituted that they cannot feel rest or satisfaction

3" A word

Timidly uttered, for she lives, the meek,

The self-restraining, the ever kind."

From Mr. Wordsworth's memorial poem to her brother. P. W., v., p. 333.

While the reprint of this work was passing through the press, inteiligence was received of her death, which took place in London, early in the summer of 1847, at the age of 83.-AMER. PUB.

of spirit without a single supreme object of tender affection in whose heart they are conscious of holding a like supremacy,-who has common hopes, loves, and interests with themselves. Without this the breezes do not refresh nor the sunbeams gladden them. A share in ever so many kind hearts does not suffice to their happiness; they must have the whole of one, as no one else has any part in it, whatever love of another kind that heart may still reserve for others. There is no reason why a brother and sister might not be to each other this second self-this dearer halfthough such an attachment is beyond mere fraternal love, and must have something in it "of choice and election," superadded to the natural tie: but it is seldom found to exist, because the durable cement is wanting the sense of security and permanence, without which the body of affection cannot be consolidated, nor the heart commit itself to its whole capacity of emotion. I believe that many a brother and sister spend their days in uncongenial wedlock, or in a restless faintly-expectant singlehood, who might form a "comfortable couple" could they but make up their minds early to take each other for better or for worse.

Two other poems of Mr. C. besides the one in which his sister is mentioned, are addressed to Mr. Lamb-This Lime-tree-bower my Prison, and the lines To a Friend, who had declared his intention of writing no more Poetry. (Poetical Works, i., p. 201 & p. 205.) In a letter to the author (Letters, i., p. 150), Lamb inveighs against the soft epithet applied to him in the first of these. He hoped his "virtues had done sucking”and declared such praise fit only to be a "cordial to some green-sick son

netteer."

Yes! they wander on

In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,

My gentle-hearted Charles! for thou hast pined
And hungered after nature, many a year,

In the great city pent, winning thy way

With sad yet patient soul through evil and pain
And strange calamity.

In the next poem he is called "wild-eyed boy." The two epithets, "wildeyed" and "gentle-hearted," will recall Charles Lamb to the minds of all who knew him personally. Mr. Talfourd seems to think that the special delight in the country, ascribed to him by my father, was a distinction scarcely merited. I rather imagine that his indifference to it was a sort of "mock apparel" in which it was his humor at times to invest himself I have been told that, when visiting the Lakes, he took as much delight in the natural beauties of the region as might be expected from a man of his taste and sensibility.4

Mr. Coleridge's expression, recorded in the Table Talk, that he "looked

4 "Thou wert a scorner of the field, my Friend,

But more in show than truth."

From Mr. W.'s poem To a good man of most dear memory, quoted in p. 331

on the degraded men and things around him like moonshine on a dunghill, that shines and takes no pollution," partly alludes to that tolerance of moral evil, both in men and books, which was so much remarked in Charles Lamb, and was, in so good a man, really remarkable. His toleration of it in books is conspicuous in the view he takes of the writings of Congreve and Wycherley, in his essay on the artificial comedy of the last century (Works, vol. ii., p. 322), and in many of his other literary criticisms. His toleration of it in men—at least his faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation, Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his Memoir (vol. ii., p. 326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, " and devious habits of thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits. He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr. Talfourd observes," but loved them, errors and all" which im. plies that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon them whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them to the obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a chess-board, into black and white compartments-a moral and intellectual chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their" over-muchness" towards some men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous idealisms. The larger half of mankind is exiled for them into a hemisphere of shadow, as dim, cold, and negative as the unlit portion of the crescent moon. Lamb's general tendency, though he too could warmly admire, was in a different direction; he was ever introducing streaks and gleams of light into darkness, rather than drowning certain objects in floods of it; and this, I think, proceeded in him from indulgence towards human nature rather than from indifference to evil. To his friend the disposition to exalt and glorify co-existed, in a very remarkable manner, with a power of severe analysis of character and poignant exhibition of it,-a power which few possess without exercising it some time or other to their own sorrow and injury. The consequence to Mr. Coleridge was that he sometimes seemed untrue to himself, when he had but brought forward, one after another, perfectly real and sincere moods of his mind.

In his fine poem commemorating the deaths of several poets, Mr. Wordsworth thus joins my father's name with that of his almost life-long friend.

Nor has the rolling year twice measured,
From sign to sign, its steadfast course,
Since every mortal power of Coleridge
Was frozen at its marvellous source;

The rapt One of the godlike forehead,
The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;
And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,
Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

S. C.

CHAPTER II.

[1791 to 1795.]

"Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with Hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!”"S. T. COLERIDGE entered at Jesus College, Cambridge, the 5th of February, 1791. He gained Sir William Brown's gold medal for the Greek Ode in the summer of that year. It was on the Slave Trade. The poetic force and originality of this Ode were, as he said himself, much beyond the language in which they were conveyed. In the winter of 1792-3 he stood for the University (Craven) Scholarship with Dr. Keate, the late head-master of Eton, Mr. Bethel (of Yorkshire), and Bishop Butler, who was the successful candidate. In 1793 he wrote, without success, for the Greek Ode on Astronomy, the prize for which was gained by Dr. Keate. The original is not known to exist, but the reader may see what is, probably, a very free version of it by Mr. Southey in his Minor Poems. (Poetical Works, vol. ii., p. 170.) "Coleridge," says a schoolfellow of his who followed him to Cambridge in 1792, was very studious, but his reading was desultory and capricious. He took little exercise merely for the sake of exercise: but he was ready at any time to unbend his mind in conversation; and, for the sake of this, his room (the ground-floor room on the right hand of the staircase facing the great gate) was a constant rendezvous of conversation-loving friends. I will not call them loungers, for they did not call to kill time, but to enjoy it. What evenings have I spent in those rooms! What little suppers, or sizings, as they were called, have I enjoyed, when Eschylus, and Plato, and Thucydides were pushed aside, with a pile of lexicons and the like, to discuss the pamphlets of the day. Ever and anon a pamphlet issued from the pen of Burke. There was no need of having the book before us :-Coleridge had read it in the morning, and in the evening he would repeat whole pages verbatim.”College Reminiscences, Gentleman's Mag., Dec., 1834.

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In May and June, 1793, Frend's trial took place in the Vice-Chancel

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