SPECIMENS OF THE SHORT

STORY.

I.-CHARLES LAMB.

(1775-1834.)

LIFE.-Charles Lamb was born in one of the Temple Buildings, London, Feb. 10, 1775. His father was clerk to Samuel Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple. At the age of seven Lamb was sent to Christ's Hospital, the "Blue Coat School," where he remained until November, 1789. Soon he entered the South Sea House. In April, 1792, he became a clerk in the office of the East India Company, where he remained thirty-three years. His severe illness during the winter of 1824-5 induced the directors of the India House to retire him on a pension. He died, five months after his friend Coleridge, Dec. 27, 1834, and was buried in Edmonton churchyard.

The real story of Lamb's life is found in his personal essays and letters. In The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple Lamb draws vivid pictures of "the pensive gentility of Samuel Salt" and, under the name of Lovel, of the "incorrigible and losing honesty" of John Lamb, his father. The Recollections of Christ's Hospital and Christ's Hospital Five-and-Thirty Years Ago are the autobiography of Lamb's school days. Sometimes the

memories are happy—of summer holiday excursions to New River when "we would live the long day in the water "-of visits to the Tower-of the "solemn procession through the City at Easter, with the Lord Mayor's largess of buns, wine, and a shilling"-of Christmas feasting and carols and mirth round the log-fire. Sometimes the memories are less joyous-of "Monday's milk

porridge, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse and choking "of friendiess days "alone among six hundred playmates." Shadows of the cloisters of the Temple and of Christ's Hospital invested the "Blue Coat " lad "with all the self-concentration of a young monk."

In other essays we catch glimpses of Lamb's family and friends. My Relations pictures half tenderly, half ironically, the inconsistencies of his brother John. The idyllic revery entitled Dream Children recalls Ann Simmons, the "Alice" of his youthful disappointment in love.

Two friendships are the crowning beauty of Lamb's personal history. At Christ's Hospital began his life-long intimacy with Coleridge" the inspired charity boy." To Coleridge, Lamb turned as to a master-"You first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness." The story of that poetic friendship is told in Lamb's letters to Coleridge. The friendship of Charles and Mary Lamb has both the deepest beauty and pathos. In the Lamb family was a strain of hereditary insanity. Charles Lamb himself in the winter of 1795-6 was in an asylum for six weeks. On Sept. 22, 1796, in a fit of temporary insanity, angered at a sewing-girl who was working with her in the family sitting-room, Mary Lamb turned upon her own mother who had interposed to save the girl, and fatally stabbed her. Charles Lamb had just come of age, but from that time forth with unique devotion he sacrificed to his sister his whole life. Mary's attacks of insanity were intermittent, and she outlived her brother by more than a dozen years. Mackery End, in Hertfordshire tells with a lover's tenderness how brother and sister lived together "old bachelor and maid, in a sort of double singleness."

WRITINGS.-In the spring of 1796, Coleridge included in a volume of his own verse four sonnets of his friend Lamb. Lamb is not remembered for his poetry, but The Old Familiar Faces has his tenderness, and A Farewell to Tobacco his quaint humor. In January, 1807, appeared the familiar Tales from Shakespeare, collaborated by Charles and Mary Lamb. Lamb's fondness for the then comparatively unknown works of other Elizabethan dramatists was shown in his Specimens of English Dramatic Poets

published in the following year. A tragedy, a "dramatic poem," and two farces, may be mentioned as Lamb's own experiments in the congenial world of the theatre.

Between

Lamb's truest poetry is his prose. In August, 1820, probably at the suggestion of Hazlitt, Lamb contributed to the London Magazine, then in its first year, Recollections of the South Sea House. He adopted the pen-name of "Elia" in whimsical memory of an obscure office clerk of that name. August, 1820, and December, 1822, Lamb contributed some twenty-five essays thus signed. These were reprinted in 1823 under the title, -Elia-Essays which have appeared under that signature in the London Magazine. Ten years later followed the volume The Last Essays of Elia. In the Elia papers and in his letters, Lamb's genius is at its height.

LITERARY QUALITIES.-Lamb's literary masters were the seventeenth century prose writers. In Fuller, Browne, and Burton he steeped himself as Thackeray did in the Queen Anne authors. From them he caught not merely their quaintness and beauty of style, but their spirit. The influence on Lamb of the Elizabethans, of Shakespeare, pre-eminently, is also marked.

The charm of Lamb's personality well-nigh disarms the critic. Scarcely any other English author comes so close to the reader's heart. Tenderness-grace-cordiality-imagination-humorsympathy-are words that come unconsciously at mention of Charles Lamb. Whatever his debt to his literary ancestors his exquisite blending of humor and pathos is peculiarly his own. Critics have sometimes urged against him lack of depth, but the lover of Elia always feels between the lines the deep heart-throbs of Lamb's own life story.

THE SUPERANnuated Man.—The following sketch, included now-a-days in The Last Essays of Elia, first appeared in the issue for May, 1825, of the London Magazine. Lamb's severe illness during the winter of 1824-5 induced the directors of the India House, where he had been employed for more than thirty years, to retire him on a pension. From February, 1825, Lamb's letters are full of the hope of emancipation from the drudgery of the East India office. To Barton, the " Quaker poet," he wrote on Feb. 10, " Oh that I were kicked out of Leadenhall with every mark of in

dignity, and a competence in my fob. The birds of the air would not be so free as I should. How I would prance and curvet it, and pick up cowslips, and ramble about purposeless as an idiot!" On March 23 he wrote again to Barton, "I have a glimpse of freedom, of becoming a gentleman at large; but I am put off from day to day. I have offered my resignation, and it is neither accepted nor rejected. Eight weeks am I kept in this fearful suspense." Before many weeks the suspense was over. 'On March 29 Lamb bade final farewell to his desk. The joy of his newfound liberty finds fullest expression in the letter of April 6 to Wordsworth-" Here am I then, after thirty-three years' slavery sitting in my own room at eleven o'clock this finest of all April mornings, a freed man, with £441 a year for the remainder of my life, live I as long as John Dennis, who outlived his annuity and starved at ninety. . .

"I came home FOREVER on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehensibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity." In a letter to Barton, Lamb writes in the same strain. He adds, however, this interesting record of his visit to the old office-" I went and sat among 'em all at my old thirty-three years' desk yester morning; and, deuce take me, if I had not yearnings at leaving all my old pen-and-ink fellows, merry, sociable lads, at leaving them in the lurch, fag, fag, fag!-The comparison of my own superior felicity gave me anything but pleasure." The most casual glance will show that from the events thus recorded in Lamb's letters grew the finished Elia sketch.

The Superannuated Man is a narrative not of action but of emotion. Plot is almost wholly subservient to character analysis. Yet, however interwoven with revery, the thread of the plot is never lost-from the day when the author takes his seat at the desk in Mincing Lane, through the tediousness of office drudgery, to final freedom in retirement on pension. From the standpoint of plot this is the climax. In the rest of the sketch, however, enough action is introduced to prevent stagnation of the plot. The revisiting of the old familiar office and the visits to the bookstalls of Soho and to the Elgin marbles maintain a slight thread of incident.