from his lips. He is of all English authors, perhaps, the one whose memory is

kept alive with the greatest personal affection, and this although his own vitality was low and intermittent. He was very short in stature, with a large hooked nose, and "almost immaterial legs," a tiny tapering figure that dwindled from the large head to the tiny gaitered ankles. "He had a long, melancholy face, with keen, penetrating eyes," and a "bland sweet smile with a touch of sadness in it." He described himself as "a Quaker in black," as "terribly shy," and

as one "whose conceptions rose kindlier than his utterances," but in truth he appears to have been the most enchanting of boon companions, and, in spite of an inveterate habit of stammering, the joy and the light of every cheerful company. Of his goodness of heart, his simplicity and his unselfishness, we have testimony from every one of those whose privilege it was to know him.

FROM "GRACE BEFORE MEAT" (Elia).

I am no Quaker at my food. I confess I am not indifferent to the kinds of it. Those unctuous morsels of deer's flesh were not made to be received with dispassionate services. I hate a man who swallows it, affecting not to know what he is eating. I suspect his taste in higher matters. I shrink instinctively from one who professes to like minced veal. There is a physiognomical character in the tastes for food. Coleridge holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple-dumplings. I am not certain but he is right.

Charles and Mary Lamb

With the decay of my first innocence, I confess a less and less relish daily for those innocuous cates. The whole vegetable tribe have lost their gust with me. Only I stick to asparagus, which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts. I am impatient and querulous under culinary disappointments, as to come home at the dinner-hour, for instance, expecting some savoury mess, and to find one quite tasteless and sapidless. Butter ill meltedthat commonest of kitchen failures-puts me beside my tenour.-The author of the Rambler used to make inarticulate animal noises over a favourite food. Was this the music quite proper to be preceded by the grace? or would the pious man have done better to postpone his devotions to a season when the blessing might be contemplated with less

perturbation? I quarrel with no man's tastes, nor would set my thin face against those excellent things, in their way, jollity and feasting. But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish-his Dagon-with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before him. Graces are the sweet preluding strains to the banquets of angels and children; to the roots and severer repasts of the Chartreuse : to the slender, but not slenderly acknowledged, refection of the poor and humble man: but at the heapedup boards of the pampered and the luxurious they become of dissonant mood, less timed and tuned to the occasion, methinks, than the noise of those better befitting organs would be, which children hear tales of at Hog's Norton.

Mackery End in Hertfordshire

long year

I have obligat was to

for one

Bridget Elia has been my house heeper for many a Budget, extending beyond the period of memory We house together, old bachelor and mard, in a sort of double singleness, with such tolerable confort upon the whole that. ffffty find in myself no sort of dusportion to go out upon the mountagnes. with the rash kings offspring, to beward my celibacy

habdo

get so, as "with a

lir

Ψε agres pretty well in our tastes SNE

in

afference. We are generally
as it should be among near relations
and once, upon my difsimbling

1

harmony with acces Our sympathers and

a lone in my vouch

wonel bickerungs rather understood, than expressed, more kind than ordinary, my altered. We are both great readers M over (for the thousandth time) some prajonge in old Burton In one contemporaries, she is abstracted in some modern sale, or adventure. whereof common readong-table daily fed with a forduously fresh supplies Narrative in the progress of wents The must have a story so there be life stirring. or evel acudents The fluctuations of fortune in fiction

have ceased to interest, of operate but dully upon me.

Out of the way

of any

that sounds odd of bizarre. Nothing goes down with her, that is guaight irregular, or out of the road

clever ". I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Releges Medice; but she must shologize for certain disrespectful insinuations, which

to me

she has been pleased to throw out latterly, louching the intellecivals of a dear

devaples, of novel philosophies and systems; but the neether wrangles with, nor

accepts, their opinions

That which was, is good and venerable to her, when she was a The news chold, retains to authority over her mind still

juggles or plays trieda

with her, understanding.

We are both of

us mclined to be a little two positive, and I have

observed the result of our disputes to be almost uniformly this