DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOOKS (Last Essays of Elia).

Shall I be thought fantastical, if I confess, that the names of some of our poets sound sweeter, and have a finer relish to the ear-to mine, at least-than that of Milton or of Shakespeare? It may be that the latter are more staled and rung upon in common discourse. The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are, Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.

Much depends upon when and where you read a book. In the five or six impatient minutes before the dinner is quite ready, who would think of taking up the Faerie Queene for a stop-gap, or a volume of Bishop Andrewes' sermons?

Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. But he brings his music, to which, who listens, had need bring docile thoughts and purged ears.

Winter evenings-the world shut out-with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the Tempest, or his own Winter's Tale

These two poets you cannot avoid reading aloud-to yourself, or (as it chances) to some single person listening. More than one-and it degenerates into an audience.

Books of quick interest, that hurry on for incidents, are for the eye to glide over only. It will not do to read them out. I could never listen to even the better kind of modern novels without extreme irksomeness.

I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone, and reading Candide.

I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected-by a familiar damsel-reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading-Pamela. There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been-any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and-went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture, whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the

The Grave of Charles and Mary Lamb at Edmonton

secret.

COLERIDGE AT CHRIST'S HOSPITAL.

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee-the dark pillar not yet turned-Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Mackery End in Hertfordshire, the subject of one of Lamb's Essays
From a Pencil Sketch

Dear Fugue-ist,

or

hear'st thou rather

Contra punlist?

We expect you four (as many as the Table will hold without squeeging)

at Mrs Westwood,

Table D'Hote on Thursday. You

will find

the White House shut up, and us moved under the wing of the Phoenix, which gives us friendly refuge. Beds for guests, marry, we have none, but cleanly accomodings at the Crown &

bLe

A Facsimile Letter from Charles Lamb to his Friend Novello

-Logician, Metaphysician, Bard!-How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus, or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity boy!

The career of THOMAS DE QUINCEY began even later, and was even more De Quincey obscure. Ten years younger than Lamb, and like him an admirer and disciple of Wordsworth

and Coleridge, De Quincey made no serious attempt to excel in verse, and started in prose not earlier than, as has been already noted, 1821, the book of the Opium - Eater appearing anonymously the following year. He had now put out from shore, and we find him for the future, practically until his death, swimming "in the midst of a German Ocean of literature," and rarely consenting to quit the pen. His collected works, with difficulty saved, just before his end, out of a chaos of anonymity, first revealed to the general public the quality of this astonishing author. In the same way, to chronicle what Wilson contributed to literature is mainly to hunt for Noctes Ambrosiana

in the files of Blackwood's Magazine. To each of these critical writers, diverse in taste and character, yet all the children of the new romantic movement, the advance of the higher journalism was the accident which brought that to the surface which might otherwise have died in them. unfertilised and unperceived.

Of this group of writers, two are now found to be predominant-Lamb for the humour and humanity of his substance, De Quincey for the extraordinary opportunity given by his form for the discussion of the elements of style. Of the latter writer it has been said that "he languished with a sort of

VOL. IV.

L

despairing nympholepsy after intellectual pleasures." His manner of writing was at once extremely splendid and extremely precise. He added to literature several branches or provinces which had up to his day scarcely been cultivated in English; among these, impassioned autobiography, distinguished by an exquisite minuteness in the analysis of recollected sensations, is preeminent. He revelled in presenting impressions of intellectual self-consciousness in phrases of what he might have called sequacious splendour. De Quincey was but little enamoured of the naked truth, and a suspicion of the fabulous hangs, like a mist, over all his narrations. The most elaborate of them, the Revolt of the Tartars, a large canvas covered with groups of hurrying figures in sustained and painful flight, is now understood to be pure romance. The first example of his direct criticism is Whiggism in its Relations to Literature, which might be called the Anatomy of a Pedant.

De Quincey is sometimes noisy and flatulent, sometimes trivial, sometimes unpardonably discursive. But when he is at his best, the rapidity of his mind, its lucidity, its humour and good sense, the writer's passionate loyalty to letters, and his organ-melody of style command our deep respect. He does not, like the majority of his critical colleagues, approach literature for purposes of research, but to obtain moral effects. De Quincey, a dreamer of beautiful dreams, disdained an obstinate vassalage to mere matters of fact, but sought with intense concentration of effort after a conscientious and profound psychology of letters.

Thomas De Quincey (1785-1859) was the second son of Thomas Quincey of Fountain Street, Manchester, and he was born on the 15th of August 1785, in a "pretty rustic dwelling" near that city. His father was a prosperous merchant, his mother a stately and intellectual but not very sympathetic lady; there seems to have been little of either parent in that vagrant genius, their second son. In 1792 the father died, and Mrs. Quincey removed with her eight children to their country house called Greenhay, and again in 1796 to Bath, where Thomas entered the grammar school. He rapidly attained a remarkable knowledge of Latin and Greek. An accidental blow on the head from an undermaster's cane led in 1799 to a very serious illness, and Mrs. Quincey would not allow her son to return; he proceeded to a private school at Winkfield in Wilts. In 1800 he went on a visit to Eton, where, in company with Lord Westport, who was his closest friend, he was brought in touch with the court, and had two amusing interviews with George III.; he then started for a long tour of many months through England and Ireland. From the close of 1800 to 1802 he was at school at Manchester, and very unhappy; at last he ran away. He was given a guinea a week by his mother, and now began an extraordinary career of vagrancy, the events of which are recounted, in the most romantic terms, in the Confessions. At length, after more than a year of squalor and almost starved in the horrors of London, he was found and sent to Oxford. He entered Worcester College, a strangely experienced undergraduate, in the autumn of 1803. His health had doubtless been greatly undermined by his privations, and in 1804 he began to take laudanum as a relief from neuralgia, and those "gnawing pains in the stomach" which were to take so prominent a part in his history. His career at Oxford was very erratic; brilliant as he was, he