have had this innocent grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany mature swinehood? "-Roast Pig. "In this catalogue of books which are no books—biblia abibliaI reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacs, Statutes at Large, the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and generally all those volumes which no gentleman's library should be without, the histories of Flavius Josephus, and Paley's Moral Philosophy.' With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding."Books and Reading. (( The adventitious lubricity of melted butter.-We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.-The greatest pleasure I know is to do good by stealth and have it found out by accident.-'T is unpleasant to meet a beggar. It is painful to deny him; and, if you relieve him, it is so much out of your pocket.-Furniture wives (emptyheaded but pretty women).' We read the "Paradise Lost" as a task,' says Dr. Johnson. 'Nobody ever wished it longer.' 'Nor the moon rounder,' he might have added. Would we have a cubit added to the stature of the Medician Venus?-Kent, the noblest conception of Shakespeare's divine mind."-Table Talk. "She is indeed, as the Americans would express it, something awful. During the months of July and August she usually renteth a cool cellar, where ices are kept, whereinto she descendeth when Sirius rageth. Softest and largest of thy sex, adieu! Not least, or least handsome, among Oxford's stately structures. Oxford who, in its deadest time of vacation, can never properly be said to be empty, having thee to fill it."-The Gentle Giantess. So much for Lamb's essays. His letters are equally attractive. Somebody has well described them as "high fantastical." Note these sentences: "My civic and poetic compliments to Southey, if at Bristol. Why, he is a very Leviathan of bards!-the small minnow I. Dream not of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! I could forgive a man for not enjoying Milton, but I would not call that man my friend who should be offended with the divine chit-chat of Cowper. I am living in a per petual feast: Coleridge has been with me now for nigh three weeks. Mary is just stuck fast in ‘All's Well that Ends Well.' She complains of having to set forth so many female characters in boys' clothes. She begins to think that Shakespeare must have wantedimagination! The first duty of an author is, I take it, never to pay anything. Have taken a room to be in between five and eight at night to avoid my nocturnal, alias knock-eternal, visitors! No new style here; all the styles are old, and some of the gates too for that matter. What a nice holiday I got on Wednesday by virtue of a princess dying! They are most like what we might suppose Petrarch would have written if Petrarch had been a fool. I have meat and drink and decent apparel; at least I shall when I get a new hat. It was quite a mistake to think that I could dislike anything you should write against Lord Byron; for I have a thorough aversion to his character, and a very moderate admiration of his genius; he is great in so little a way. Being asked if his father (William Wordsworth) had ever been on Westminster Bridge, he answered that he did not know. Harmless red ink, or, as the witty mercantile phrase hath it, clerk's blood. Leg of lamb, as before, hot at four. And the heart of Lamb forever! They (the custom-house people) could not comprehend how a waistcoat marked Henry Robinson could be a part of Miss Lamb's wearing apparel. So they seized it for the King, who will probably appear in it at the next levee. Shelley I saw once. His voice was the most obnoxious squeak I ever was tormented with, ten thousand times worse than the laureate's, whose voice is the worst thing about him except his laureateship. My essays want no preface; they are all preface. The pig was above my feeble praise. It was a dear pigmy. Why did you give it me? I do not like you enough to give you anything so good. A middle-aged gentleman and a half. I am flatter than a denial or a pancake; duller than a country stage when the actors are off (on?) it; a cipher, an O! I can't distinguish beef from mutton. My skull is a Grub Street attic, to let. A line of Wordsworth is a lever to lift the immortal spirit; Byron can only move the spleen. Summer, as my friend Coleridge waggishly writes, has set in with his usual severity. A Scotchman assured me he did not see much in Shakespeare. I replied, 'I dare say not.' He felt the equivoke, looked awkward and reddish, but soon returned to the attack by saying that he thought Burns was as good as Shakespeare. I said I had no doubt he was to a Scotchman. I have been to a funeral, where I made a pun, to the consternation of the rest of the mourners. I can't describe the howl the widow set up at proper intervals. Dash could, for it is not unlike what he makes. The story is as simple as George Dyer and the language as plain as his spouse. The burly old Duke of Norfolk, a nobleman, every stun of him. We are in the last ages of the world, when St. Paul prophesied that women should be 'headstrong, lovers of their own wills, having albums.' Has Mrs. He-mans (double masculine) done anything pretty lately? Cats, put 'em on a rug before the fire, wink their eyes up, and then purr, which is their poetry." And so one might quote on and on. Is it any wonder that Wordsworth called Lamb the frolic and the gentle? And yet extracts do him scant justice. His letters need to be read entire. In lieu thereof, look into a few of them. In 8 you will find tragedy. In 56 he runs riot in airy persiflage about George Dyer, the old dramatists, and mathematics. In 59 he invites the friendly, the mathematical Manning, to visit him; surely no mortal could resist the enticement of that note. In 78, to Wordsworth, he chants the charms of London as superior to those of the lakes and mountains of Cumberland. In 188 he moralizes on the coxcombry of taught charity. In 240 he tells of his manumission on a pension of 441 pounds from the slavery of Leadenhall Street. In 285 he relates with mingled pathos and humor the life, works, and death of old Norris, the librarian of the Temple. In 196 he tells, in a fashion that teachers and pupils must like, how he taught, or rather did not teach, Latin to Emma. Dogs, or rather his dog Dash, are the theme of 307. Lamb was also a poet in a small way. His Farewell to Tobacco is rich in fancies and in images, while in "When maidens such as Hester die " there is real pathos. His best and most familiar verses, however, are these: “I have had playmates, I have had companions, In the days of my childhood, in my joyful school days- "How some they have died, and some they have left me, And some are taken from me, all are departed; QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES 1. What do you know of Lamb's family life; how is it reflected in his essays? 2. Who was Lamb's most famous school companion? 3. Aside from his essays, upon what form of literature rests Lamb's fame? 4. In what period of English literature did he succeed in awakening an interest? 5. Read "Dream Children" and write one hundred words upon its literary quality. 6. Who was Elia? 7. Writing was Lamb's recreation. Make a list of fifteen authors whom you have been studying and determine in the case of each whether he made literature his profession or recreation. 8. Imitating Lamb's form of treatment, write an essay of two hundred words upon his character. 9. Tell the class Lamb's mode of life. Does it correspond to our automobile-and-express-train existence? 10. Write two hundred words, comparing the appeal of Lamb's essays with that of any other man whom you have studied. "" 66 Suggested Readings.-In "Poor Relations," "Oxford in the Vacation," Dream Children," "The Praise of Chimney Sweeps," and in any of his letters that you may obtain in the library you will find out more about Charles Lamb than you will in any book written by some one else about him. CHAPTER XXXII LORD BYRON (1788-1824) A person of the most consummate genius."-Shelley. "The teeth-grinding, glass-eyed, lone Caloyer."—Carlyle. LORD BYRON was born January 22, 1788, in London. He was descended from a family of Norse pirates, who had come over with William the Conqueror, who had received the Priory of Newstead from Henry VIII, who had fought bravely for Charles II against Cromwell, and among whom in the eighteenth century had been a distinguished sailor, John Byron, who was known as "Foul-weather Jack." Byron's father was a spendthrift and abandoned his wife and child. There may have been some excuse for this, as she was a woman of violent temper and singularly unfortunate lack of judgment. Her own son admitted that she was a fool. On one occasion she flung a poker at his head and she finally died in a paroxysm of rage caused by reading an upholsterer's bill. Her son inherited the temperament of his mother, his father's morals, a head the beauty of which artists loved to copy, and a foot the deformity of which beggars in the street mimicked. The result was that, throughout his life, though he was one of the most gifted, he was also one of the unhappiest of men. His secondary education was at Harrow, whither he was sent 1801. Here he became proficient with his fists, played on the cricket team, obtained a smattering of German, learned to read French, and mastered Italian. He was also a great reader, consuming much history and biography, some philosophy, a little divinity, all the novels then extant, some good Greek and many mediocre English orators, and all of the poets. He fought George Sinclair's battles and George in return did his school exercises. He was entered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1805, and took his degree 1808. At Trinity his most noteworthy exploits were to introduce a tame bear as a candidate for. a fellowship, which pleased the faculty not, and to publish a book of |