member that he and all his family attended the poet's lectures five years before. He tells him alluringly that this is a brand-new course, with nothing metaphysical about it, and adds: "There are particular reasons just now, and have been for the last twenty years, why he [Coleridge] should succeed. He will do so with a little encouragement."

Doubtless; but it is worthy of note that the next time the subject is mentioned is in a letter to Mrs. Wordsworth, written more than two months later. The lectures are now in progress; very successful, we hear; but-Lamb has been to none of them. He intends to go soon, of course, so do we always; but, in the mean while, he is treating resolution with a good deal of zest, and making the best plea he can for his defalcation. With desperate

candor he writes:

"I mean to hear some of the course, but lectures are not much to my taste, whatever the lecturer may be. If read, they are dismal flat, and you can't think why you are brought together to hear a man read his works, which you could read so much better at leisure yourself. If delivered extempore, I am always in

pain lest the gift of utterance should suddenly fail the orator in the middle, as it did me at the dinner given in honor of me at the London Tavern. 'Gentlemen,' said I, and there I stopped; the rest my feelings were under the necessity of supplying."

We can judge pretty well from this letter just how many of those lectures on Shakespeare Lamb was likely to hear; and all doubts are set at rest when we find Coleridge, the following winter, endeavoring to lure his reluctant friend to another course by the tation of a complimentary ticket. device fails of its wonted success.

presenEven this

Lamb is

He

eloquent in thanks, and lame in excuses. has been in an "incessant hurry." He was unable to go on the evening he was expected because it was the night of Kenney's new comedy, "which has utterly failed," — this is mentioned as soothing to Coleridge's wounded feelings. He has mistaken his dates, and supposed there would be no lectures in Christmas week. He is as eager to vindicate himself as Miss Edgeworth's Rosamond, and he is as sanguine as ever about the future. "I trust," he writes, "to hear many a course yet;" and

with this splendid resolution, which is made without a pang, he wanders brightly off to a more engaging topic.

It is a charming little bit of comedy, and has, withal, such a distinctly modern touch, that we might fancy it enacted in this year of grace eighteen hundred and ninety-four by any of our weak and erring friends.

In these days of grace when all manner of evil-doers have their apologists; when we are bidden to admire the artistic spirit of Nero and the warm-hearted integrity of Henry the Eighth; when a "cult for Domitian" and a taste for Nihilists contend with each other in our estimation; it may not be ill-timed nor unduly venturesome to offer a few modest arguments in behalf of those Pariahs of modern literature, the anonymous reviewers of the press. They have been harshly abused for so many years. They have been targets for the wrath of authors, the scorn of satirists, the biting comments of injured genius. And now, when milder manners and gentler modes of speech are replacing the vigorous Billingsgate of our ancestors; when theologians and politicians make war upon one another with some show of charity and discretion, the reviewer alone is excluded from this semblance of goodwill, the reviewer alone a thing apart from

brotherhood-is pelted as openly as ever. The stones that are cast at him are so big and so hard that if he still lives, and, in a mild way, even flourishes, it must be because of his own irritating obtusiveness, because of his unpardonable reluctance to come forward decently and be killed.

Now, when I read the list of his misdeeds, as they are set forth categorically by irate novelists and poets, when I hear of his "ferocity, incompetence and dishonesty," I am filled with heroic indignation and with craven fear. But when I turn from these scathing comments to a few columns of book notices, and see for myself the amiable effort that is made in them to say something reasonably pleasant about every volume, I begin to think that Mr. Lang is right when he complains that the ordinary anonymous reviewer is, as the Scotch lassie said of a modest lover, "senselessly ceevil," good-natured and forbearing to a fault. If he sins, it is through indifference, and not through brutality. He is more anxious to spare himself than to attack his author. He has that provoking charity which is based upon unconcern, and he looks upon a book with a gentle