the connoisseur would naturally look for it. This strange and beautiful tale belongs to the poetical period of Lamb's life, and indeed to say "Poems and Rosamund Gray" is like saying "Poems, in Verse and Prose." The Poems proper will be arranged in chronological order, and the Plays will follow at the end of the book. I think Canon Ainger carried his chronologising (for which we must thank him) a step too far when he placed an entire long drama like "John Woodvil" at a certain point in a succession of little poems. It overshadows these little things: you cannot find the minnows for the leviathan in their midst.

In the next three volumes (VI.-VIII.) are coordinated and given in their completeness a run of Books for Children which are instinct with the innocence and gentleness and wisdom and charm which we associate with the name of Charles Lamb, the humour also not being absent, but attuned very cunningly to the pleasure and comprehension of little ears. Of those books, some are by Charles alone, some by Charles and Mary, as all the world knows. I shall follow the precedent set by even the earliest Editors and make no unkindly separation between the work of the brother and the sister. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and this immortal part of them must not be divided. In this section of the works, also, the present edition will be more complete than any hitherto published, and will contain all the Lost Works recently recovered, with all the original illustrations carefully reproduced.

Without the "Specimens from the Dramatists " no edition of Lamb can be considered complete or in the fullest sense representative of the quality of his genius or the amount of his gift to English Literature. His mind was shown hardly less in the master-spirit of discrimination at work in choosing the examples

than in the flood of illumination which he shed fitfully upon the text; illustrating, as it were casually and unawares, not this or that passage in an old play only, but the very operations of the imagination, the secrets of the soul. Vols. IX. and X. of this edition will contain the "Specimens" (with the Garrick Extracts), which will be chronologically arranged, and the Text, as far as possible, corrected by collation with the best modern recensions of the dramatists.

In the preceding pages I have said almost nothing about the "Letters." They would be a long topic to talk of, as they are a difficult subject to control. It is acknowledged that in intrinsic literary importance, and in the interest they have for everybody who is interested in Charles Lamb, they are scarcely second to any body of work that has come from his pen. All that there is space to say of them hereand what thing more delightful could be said ?-is that the present collection (vols. XI. and XII. of the edition) will contain a much greater number of Letters than any hitherto published; including not only all those that are copyright in the Fitzgerald Edition, but also a number of important and characteristic examples never printed till now.

Finally, these things have not been done without expense, as the Publishers might say; nor without taking trouble, as even I might say; nor without the co-operation and kindness of a multitude of friends, as it becomes us all to say. Individual acknowledgments a many will have to be made, if only one could do it with all the grace and gratitude that the occasion calls for. But each thank-you will appear, and be more in place, in the volume which carries the benefit of these kindnesses. Here it will be sufficient if I express my own thanks to the Publishers for having done all in their power to make my part in

the work as easy as the labours of Hercules ever admit of being made. And along with this must go my acknowledgments to Miss Marian Edwardes, whose help-collaboration, I ought to call it has been of the greatest possible service at every part of the work of preparation, and will be found to have done more than the official genius of the Editor to enhance the value of some of the volumes.

W. M.

THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE

READER, in thy passage from the Bank-where

thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like myself) to the Flower Pot, to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other thy suburban retreat northerly,-didst thou never observe a melancholy looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left-where Threadneedle-street abuts upon Bishopsgate? I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and

pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comersout-a desolation something like Balclutha's.1

This was once a house of trade,—a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was here-the quick pulse of gain-and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases; offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces-deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the still more sacred interiors of court and committee rooms, with venerable faces of beadles, door-keepers-directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend,) at long worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry;-the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and sub-governors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty;-huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated ;-dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of the Bay of Panama !-The long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls, whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration: -with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal,-long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE.

Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I knew it, a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. No

1 I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate. -OSSIAN.