2, 1811, to congratulate "dear Sarah" on the birth of a son who afterwards became well known as an author and editor. "Charles sends his love," she says, "perhaps, though, he will write a scrap to Hazlitt at the end. He is now looking over me. He is always in my way, for he has had a month's holydays at home, but I am happy to say they end on Monday." It was her gentle bit of fun about the brother who loved her and teased her so. The "scrap" to Hazlitt is written on the same sheet. He says:

"DEAR HAZLITT, -I cannot help accompanying my sister's congratulations to Sarah with some of my own to you on this happy occasion of a man-child being born. Delighted Fancy already sees him some future rich Alderman or opulent merchant, painting, perhaps, a little in his leisure hours for amusement, like the late H. Bunbury, Esq. Pray, are the Winterslow Estates entailed? I am afraid lest the young dog when he grows up should cut down the woods and leave no groves for widows to take their lonesome solace in. The Wern Estate, of course, can only devolve on him in case of your brother leaving no male issue. Well, my blessing & heaven's be upon him & make him like his father, with something a better temper and a smoother head of hair, and then all the men & women must love him. Martin & the Card-boys join in congratulations. Love to Sarah. Sorry we are not within caudle-shot.

"C. LAMB."

A quaint and attractive figure must he have been according to the testimony of all who have recorded their impressions of him. Patmore, Carlyle, and Mr. Le Grice all refer to his Jewish look. Patmore calls it a Rabbinical look, due, no doubt, to his sallow complexion, his black, crispy hair, and his large, slightly hooked nose. "The leanest of mankind," having what Tom Hood called "immaterial legs," walking slowly with a plantigrade step, he must have drawn to himself the attention of the most careless of wayfarers in Russell Street as he wended his way cityward. What would we not give to listen for a few moments to a fragment of his talk; but the phonograph was then unknown, and if there had been such a thing in the room he would never have talked to it. De Quincey records that in miscellaneous gatherings he said little unless an opening arose for a pun. The fastidious taste of the present day is scornful of puns; I believe that such childish things are altogether unpopular. Would we now tolerate Charles Lamb's paranomasia?

I can never quite make out whether or not the opium-eater really liked Lamb. With all his innocent pose as a disinterested and eccentric man of letters (I believe that his eccentricity was not wholly unaffected), De Quincey had a spice of maliciousness about him, and while he had much that was pleasant to say about Elia, his remarks concerning Lamb's "eclipse of sleep" after the wine of the dinner had a tinge of sarcastic indulgence. The man who drank laudanum from a decanter was rejoiced to find a compatriot who absorbed other dangerous fluids. One would hardly care to have his post-prandial slumber given to posterity in this fashion: "It descended upon him as softly as a shadow. In a gross person, laden with superfluous flesh, and sleeping heavily, this would have been disagreeable; but in Lamb, thin even to meagreness, spare and wiry as an Arab of the desert, or as Thomas Aquinas, wasted by scholastic vigils, the affection of sleep seemed rather a network of aerial gossamer than of earthly cobweb-more like a golden haze falling upon him gently from the heavens than a cloud exhaling upward from the flesh." It is poetic, but after all it means that the subject of this dainty sketch drank more than was good for him at dinner, and went to sleep after it. But De Quincey was prone to indulge in exaggerations and to the giving of sly stabs to his luckless acquaintances. Wonderful master of English speech that he was, with all his faults we love him. He was a charming old rascal, a curiosity of literature, a "wee intellectual wizard," as Masson calls him; like "the phantom in 'Hamlet,' " according to Hood; and of him saith Thomas Carlyle, our bitter critic of Lamb: "When he sate, you would have taken him by candle-light for the beautifullest little child, blue - eyed, sparkling face, had there not been a something, too, which said, 'Eccovi'this child has been in hell."

In the cabinet by the north window are a few letters, all in the delicate chirography and bluish ink of the wizard of the laudanum-flask, and I am fond of them. One is enclosed in a faded envelope, with a postage-stamp of half a century ago, addressed to Raymond Yates. I have a sense of guilt in reproducing it, but I cannot refrain from giving it, for it has some literary interest, and almost everything connected with this charming man of letters appeals to lovers of books.

"EDINBURGH, Monday, June 9, 1845.

"SIR,-I have this moment received your note, dated June 5, by a messenger from the Messrs. Blackwood. You do me too much honor in thinking it worth your while to inquire after a Life of Milton on the ground (which you courteously assign) that it was written by myself. It is true that I wrote such a Life; but it could not have made more than a pamphlet in point of bulk; and I fear much that this slender size, so incommensurate to the grandeur of the subject, will turn out to be the most distinguished of its merits. It was written in 1831, and, if I remember rightly, for some General Biographical Series then issuing under the auspices of the Society (I know not whether now defunct or whether in fact it ever had a real existence) 'for diffusing useful knowledge.' But in whatever body or shadow or fiction of a shadow the property of the work might finally have vested-my own communication with that dim Abstraction (doubtful then to my mind, and more so through a cloud of years) lay through Mr. Charles Knight, the publisher, at that time living in

Nor

Pall Mall East. In treating so lightly a sketch, which (considering its theme) ought to have been worth a graver notice, I assure you that I speak most unaffectedly; it may happen to be better than I suspect; but the truth is that I have never seen it in print. should I feel sure that it was in print were it not that some years ago I observed four or five times in newspapers a sentence or two quoted as from some recent Life of Milton which I recognized as my own both in respect to the thought and to the expression. If by its subject it ought to have been good, on the other hand, by the circumstances of its composition it ought to be intolerably bad. For it was written, as too often what I write is written, without any books for reference; under sufferings which would now be indescribablehaving faded even to my own memory through their own intensity, and under so humble an inspiration as that furnished by certain owners of gold. The sketch of Shakespeare in the Enc. Brit., which you mention in terms too flattering, was also mine. But it stands in all respects on the same level, I imagine, with the Milton, and also (as at the moment I recollect) with a Pope published in the same vast Miscellany. It was written with even more want of books for reference; it was written in the intervals of suffering greater if possible; and it was written upon a motive not at all more elevated, unless Scotch bank-notes have any precedence in point of dignity over English sovereigns. I remain, sir, with thanks for the interest you express in anything I have written,

"Your obedient humble servant,

"THOMAS DE QUINCEY."

In a moment of carelessness I once spoke of De Quincey as an "opium-swiller," for which I was censured by judicious friends who thought the epithet vulgar. The word "swiller" is not ele