hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female, an occasion upon which no odds against him would have prevented the interference of Lovell. He would stand the next day bare-headed to the same person, modestly to excuse his interference, for Lovell never forgot where something better was not concerned. Lovell was the liveliest little fellow breathing; had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble (I have a portrait of him, which confirms it); possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry-next to Swift and Prior; moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage-boards and such small cabinet toys to perfection; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility; made punch better than any man of his degree in England; had the merriest quips and conceits; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover, and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with." There is nothing more delicate or more graphic than this in the Essays of Elia. The conception of airy vivacity is helped by the introduction of Garrick, the likeness to whom is more than confirmed by the engraving given in Mr. Proctor's volume. The fine turn for humorous poetry, which filial admiration placed "next to Swift and Prior," is represented by a thin quarto volume of poems, published by request of friends, and by desire of a benefit society, and which contained verses, like Dodsley's "Muse in Livery," descriptive of what he had observed in his profession.

He was considerably older than his wife, whose maiden name was Elizabeth Field. She was the daughter of “a Bruton who had married a Field," and came from near Ware, in Hertfordshire. She was in the family of the Wards, at their old seat Blakesware, and lived and died there as housekeeper.

Mrs. Lamb was considered to resemble Mrs. Siddons in an extraordinary degree. So, with parents resembling such great artists, the son might fairly expect to inherit a strong dramatic taste. Both were gay and fond of amusement. They were established in Crown-office Row, a heavy row of buildings in the Inner Temple, facing the river, which has since been rebuilt, where Mr. Salt, the bencher, also lived. There his three children were born. John, the eldest, in 1763; Mary, two years later; and Charles, the youngest and most celebrated, on Feb. 10, 1775.

He was a sensitive child with a delicate temper, which seems to have been misunderstood or neglected by his gay parents. The eldest was the mother's favorite. "They loved pleasure, and parties, and visiting; but as they found the tenor of my mind to be quite opposite, they gave themselves little trouble about me, but on such occasions left me to my choice, which was much oftener to stay at home, and indulge myself in my solitude, than join in their rambling visits." The picture indeed of what was to be this lonely childhood, and its results on the literary character of the man-future Elia-finds a curious parallel in the recently published life of Charles Dickens, out of the very wretchedness of whose childhood seems to have been developed the whole wealth and coloring of his special power and humor. It is not that the mere vivid description and recollection of childish events make a substantial part of their writing, but that the unnaturally acute observation of men and things during those early days of desertion enforced a concentration of ideas and an early vigor. The child's view is purer, is undisturbed by the hackneyed associations of the world; and when its mind, as was the case with Dickens and Lamb, is isolated, driven in on itself by neglect, these impressions are burnt in as it were, grow up as the child grows up, and color all its maturest years. That this was the case with Dickens, has been shown in the recently-published account of his life, where it became unexpectedly disclosed to the world that the almost tragic solitude and misery of his childish years, became not only the foundation of his style, but the treasury on which he drew for his characters and description. The early recollections of both writers, when put side by side, have the strongest

similarity-the same airy, dainty touch, the same reverence and earnestness of treatment which elevates what might seem trivial into dignity. Nor can the likeness be considered the result of an unconscious imitation by the latter writer: it was the cruel probation that made the early years of both the most important, and left an impression on the rest of their lives that never wore out. He himself, indeed, later, shadowed forth this theory, showing that he was conscious of this mysterious force-of this old power: "In the heart of childhood there will forever spring up a well of innocent, of wholesome superstition: the seeds of exaggeration will be busy there, and vital,from every-day forms educing the unknown and uncommon. While childhood and while dreams, reducing childhood, shall be left, imagination shall not have spread her holy wings totally to fly the earth.”

.

The young lad was not, however, wholly deserted. He found a friend and comforter in an old aunt, a pensionary of the family an antique, quaint figure, herself apart not being a favorite of the family, or thinking herself a little neglected she clung to the little child, saying, with some ungraciousness towards her hosts, it was the only thing in the world she loved. She was “dear and good, one whom single blessedness had soured to the world. She was from morning till night poring over good books and devotional exercises. Her favorite volumes were Thomas à Kempis,' in Stanhope's translation, and a Roman Catholic prayer-book, with the matins and complines regularly set down terms which I was at that time too young to understand. She persisted in reading them, though admonished daily concerning their papistical tendency, and went to church every sabbath, as a good Protestant should do. These were the only books she studied; though I think at one period of her life, she told me she had read, with great satisfaction, the 'Memoirs of an Unfortunate Young Nobleman.'. . . . With some little asperities in her constitution. she was a steadfast, friendly being, and a fine old Christian." She was a woman of strong sense and a shrewd mind; extraordinary at a repartee — one of a few occasions of her breaking silence, else she did not much value wit. She was his father's sister, and ten years older than he. Her affection for the boy was constant displayed when he was a wretched little sufferer to small-pox, at only five years old, when at school, and later, under a terrible trial. But she unconsciously ministered to a diseased and morbid affection of his nature; and when actual derangement of mind came long after, it is easy to tell when the first seeds of it were sown.

Close to their rooms was a closet, in which was a number of Mr. Salt's books, and the careless parents allowed Charles and his sister to spend their time there, turning over great volumes they could not read, and gazing at mysterious pictures in old folios. The results of this pas time furnish an almost awful picture of childish terrors, and show that there must have been in both brother and sister some tendency to weakness of mind. "Here," he says in the character of "Maria Howe," "when my parents have been from home, I have stayed for hours together, till the loneliness, which pleased me so at first, has at length be come quite frightful, and I have rushed out of the closet into the inhabited parts of the house, and sought refuge in the lap of some one of the female servants, or of my aunt, who would say, seeing me look pale, that I had been frightening myself with some of those nasty books: so she used to call my favorite volumes, which I would not have parted with no, not with one of the least of them - if 1 had had the choice to be made a fine prince, and to gov ern the world. But my aunt was no reader. She used to excuse herself, and say that reading hurt her eyes. I have been naughty enough to think that this was only an excuse; for I found that my aunt's weak eyes did not prevent her from poring ten hours a day upon her prayer-book, or her favorite Thomas à Kempis.' But this was always her excuse for not reading any of the books I recommended. The attention and fondness which she showed to me, conscious as I was that I was almost the only being she felt any thing like fondness to, made me love her, as it was

natural: indeed, I am ashamed to say, that I fear I almost loved her better than both my parents put together. But there was an oddness, a silence, about my aunt, which was never interrupted but by her occasional expressions of love to me, that made me stand in fear of her. An odd look from under her spectacles would sometimes scare me away, when I had been peering up in her face to make her kiss

me.

Then she had a way of muttering to herself, which, though it was good words, and religious words, that she was mumbling, somehow I did not like. My weak spirits, and the fears I was subject to, always made me afraid of any personal singularity or oddness in any one. But I must return to my studies, and tell you what books I found in the closet, and what reading I chiefly admired. There was a great Book of Martyrs,' in which I used to read, or rather I used to spell out meanings; for I was too ignorant to make out many words: but there it was written all about those good men who chose to be burned alive, rather than forsake their religion and become naughty Papists. Some words I could make out, some I could not; but I made out enough to fill my little head with vanity; and I used to think I was so courageous I could be burned too; and I would put my hands upon the flames which were pictured in the pretty pictures which the book had, and feel them. Then there was a book not so big, but it had pictures in it. It was called Culpepper's Herbal.' It was full of pictures of plants and herbs; but I did not much care for that. There was Salmon's Modern History,' out of which I picked a good deal. It had pictures of Chinese gods, and the great hooded serpent, which ran strangely in my fancy. There were some law books, too; but the old English frightened me from reading them. But, above all, what I relished was 'Stackhouse's History of the Bible,' where there was the picture of the ark, and all the beasts getting into it. This delighted me, because it puzzled me: and many an aching head have I got with poring into it, and contriving how it might be built, with such and such rooms, to hold all the world, if there should be another flood; and sometimes settling what pretty beasts should be saved, and what should not: for I would have no ugly or deformed beasts in my pretty ark. Besides the picture of the ark, and many others which I have forgot, Stackhouse contained one picture which made more impression upon my childish understanding than all the rest; it was the picture of the raising-up of Samuel, which I used to call the Witch-ofEndor picture. I was always very fond of picking up stories about witches. There was a book called Glanvil on Witches,' which used to lie about in this closet; it was thumbed about, and showed it had been much read in former times. This was my treasure. Here I used to pick out the strangest stories.

"These stories of witches so terrified me, that my sleeps were broken; and, in my dreams, I always had a fancy of a witch being in the room with me. I was let grow up wild, like an ill weed; and thrived accordingly. One night, that I had been terrified in my sleep with my imaginations, I got out of bed, and crept softly to the adjoining room. My room was next to where my aunt usually sat when she was alone. Into her room I crept for relief from my fears. The old lady was not yet retired to rest, but she was sitting with her eyes half open, half closed; her spectacles tottering upon her nose; her head nodding over her prayer-book; her lips mumbling the words as she read them, or half read them, in her dozing posture; her grotesque appearance, her old-fashioned dress, resembling what I had seen in that fatal picture in Stackhouse. All this, with the dead time of night, as it seemed to me (for I had gone through my first sleep), joined to produce a wicked fancy in me, that the form which I beheld was not my aunt, but some witch. Her mumbling of her prayers confirmed me in this shocking idea. I had read in Glanvil of those wicked creatures reading their prayers backwards; and I thought that this was the operation which her lips were at this time employed about. Instead of flying to her friendly lap for that protection which I had so often experienced when I have been weak and timid, I shrunk back, terrified and bewildered, to my bed, where I lay, in broken sleeps and

miserable fancies, till the morning which I had so much reason to wish for came. My fancies a little wore away with the light; but an impression was fixed, which could not for a long time be done away. In the daytime, when my father and mother were about the house, when I saw them familiarly speak to my aunt, my fears all vanished; and when the good creature had taken me upon her knees, and shown me any kindness more than ordinary, at such times I have melted into tears, and longed to tell her what naughty, foolish fancies I had had of her. But when night returned, that figure which I had seen recurred, - the posture, the half-closed eyes, the mumbling and muttering which I had heard. A confusion was in my head, who it was I had seen that night: it was my aunt, and it was not my aunt it was that good creature who loved me above all the world, engaged at her good task of devotions — perhaps praying for some good to me. Again it was a witch, a creature hateful to God and man, reading back-. wards the good prayers; who would perhaps destroy me."

...

This is a terrible picture, and highly dramatic; but in Elia he is even more distinct: "The night-time, solitude, and the dark, were my hell. The sufferings I endured in this nature would justify the expression. I never laid my head on my pillow, I suppose, from the fourth to the seventh or eighth year of my life. without an assurance which realized its own prophecy of seeing some frightful spectre. Be old Stackhouse, then, acquitted in part, if I say, that to his picture of the witch raising up Samuel (oh that old man covered with a mantle!) I owe not my midnight terrors, the hell of my infancy, but the shape and manner of this visitation. It was he who also dressed up for me a hag that nightly sat upon my pillow - -a sure bedfellow when my aunt or maid was far from me. All day long, while the book was permitted me, I dreamed, waking, over this delineation; and at night (if I may use so bold an expression), awoke into sleep and found the vision true. I durst not, even in the daylight, once enter the chamber where I slept, without my face turned to the window, aversely from the bed where my witch-ridden pillow was. Parents do not know what they do when they leave tender babes alone to go to sleep in the dark. The feeling about for a friendly arm- the hoping for a familiar voice, when they wake screaming, and find none to soothe them - what a terrible shaking it is to their poor nerves." In this essay he deals gaily with Stackhouse, and describes in his happiest vein, how, "turning over the picture of an ark with too much haste, I unhappily made a breach in its ingenious fabric, driving my inconsiderate fingers right through the two larger quadrupeds, the elephant and the camel, that stare (as well they might) out of the two last windows next the steerage in that unique piece of naval architecture. On this, Stackhouse was summarily forbidden, and locked up."

But it was extraordinary how many things conspired to unsettle the tender wits of the forlorn child. Even theological doubts were to assail him: and the bulky commentator was not indicted before he had had time to disturb even the elementary and shadowy religious ideas present to the mind of a child five or six years old. The process is thus described:

"I remember it consisted of Old Testament stories, orderly set down, with the objection appended to each story, and the solution to the objection regularly tacked to that. The objection was a summary of whatever difficulties had been opposed to the credibility of the history, by the shrewdness of ancient or modern infidelity, drawn up with an almost complimentary excess of candor. The solution was brief, modest, and satisfactory. The bane and antidote were both before you. To doubts so put, and so quashed, there seemed to be an end forever. The dragon lay dead, for the foot of the veriest babe to trample on. But like as was rather feared than realized from that slain monster

in Spenser from the womb of those crushed errors young dragonets would creep, exceeding the prowess of so tender a Saint George as myself to vanquish. The habit of expecting objections to every passage, set me upon starting more objections, for the glory of finding a solution of my

own for them. I became staggered and perplexed - a sceptic in long coats. The pretty Bible stories which I had read, or heard read in church, lost their purity and sincerity of impression, and were turned into so many historic and chronologic theses to be defended against whatever impugners. I was not to disbelieve them, but the next thing to that I was to be quite sure that some one or other would or had disbelieved them. Next to making a child an infidel, is the letting him know that there are infidels at all. Oh, how ugly sound scriptural doubts from the mouth of a babe and a suckling!" The child was in this morbid state, when there fortunately arrived on a visit, his Grandmamma Field, another affectionate relation, whose heart yearned towards this curious, but interesting child. A few weeks in the country she saw would clear its head of these fancies, and bring back a healthy tone. The gay Garrick-like father and matronly Siddons, made no objection. "I went with some reluctance at leaving my closet, my dark walk, and even my aunt, who had been such a source of both love and terror to me."

see

This visit was down to Blakesware, in Hertfordshire, which with the old granddame, who was its sole occupant, fills so important a place in Lamb's writing. Blakesmoor, or Blakesware, is one of the fairy castles familiar and real to every reader of taste: the solitary old housekeeper who lived in it is a classic; yet it is the observation of a child of six or seven years old that has furnished this pleasantest of perpetual legacies. "It was a decayed place; the owners the Wards - had long forsaken the old house of their fathers for a newer trifle, and who preferred living in a newer and more fashionable mansion which he had purchased somewhere in an adjoining county. Thus she was left in possession. Though she was not, indeed, the mistress of this great house, but had only the charge of it (and yet in many respects she might be said to be the mistress of it too) committed to her... but still she lived in it in a manner as if it had been her own, and kept up the dignity of the great house in a sort while she lived." She was a tall, upright, graceful person, and had beenhow the picture grows. the best dancer of the day. A stern, determined whist-player, all for the clear fire and rigor of the game: for being thus quasi mistress had thus been in office some sixty years of her life-she was considered in the neighborhood, and likely enough, played hostess. It was a rare old house, with a noble hall with a mosaic pavement, round which were ranged busts of the twelve Cæsars- its justice hall, with the disused high-backed magisterial chairs its noble picture-gallery of old portraits, a tattered and diminished scutcheon hanging over the great staircase, the tapestried bed-chamber, and even the haunted room, which the old guardian would occupy. Outside, too, the venerable wooding, concealing a noisy brook, beautiful fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall; the ample pleasure-garden rising backward from the house in triple terraces, with flower-pots now of palest, save that a speck here and there, saved from the elements, bespake their pristine state to have been gilt and glittering; the verdant quarters backwarder still; and stretching still beyond in old formality, the fiery wilderness, the haunt of the squirrel, and the day-long murmuring wood-pigeon, with that antique image in the centre, god or goddess I wist not."

and she

The change for the London boy was amazing. He was enchanted into a new world. It filled his little soul. He was there "as in a holy temple." The cold marble busts of the Cæsars impressed him awfully: in his manhood and old age, these images, as of something stately and magnificent, were ever before him. "The frowning beauty of Nero," extorting his wonder, "the mild Galba" his love. Every day he mounted on chairs to look at them, and read the inscriptions underneath, until they became familiar as human faces. Indeed, those who have seen these busts in the Vatican and other museums, will own to the strange and impressive character of these faces, as being likely of all things in the world to impress a child. There was a row of Hogarth's prints running round underneath, which delighted him no less. But with the old portraits he was

"There were old men, and

more mysteriously affected. women, and children; one - and then another—would seem to smile, reaching forward from the canvas." He longed to have a fairy-power to call the children down from their frames to play with him. One little girl who hung beside a glass door that opened into the garden, he delighted to invite to walk with him - a beauty with cool blue pastoral drapery, and bright yellow hair, her arm round a lamb's neck, a bunch of roses in her hand. He would fearlessly explore the house, though he could only see the great rooms by light which came glimmering in over the tops of the closed window-shutters, marking out indistinctly the carved chimney-pieces, the ancient worked furniture, the covers of which he would fearfully lift to have a peep. To say nothing of the faded tapestry, "so much better than painting, not adorning merely, but peopling the wainscots; " glancing at those stern, bright visages, staring reciprocally; all over on the walls Acteon, and Diana, and Phœbus, pleasing Marsyas. On a marble slab in a corner of the hall, he found even "tarnished gilt leather battledores, and crumbling feathers of shuttlecocks," left as they were twenty years before.

Outside, too, the child found no less a charm in the noble grounds," sometimes in the spacious old-fashioned gardens, which I had almost to myself, unless when now and then a solitary gardening man would cross me and how the nectarines and peaches hung upon the walls, without my ever offering to pluck them, because they were forbidden fruit, unless now and then, and because I had more pleasure in strolling about among the old melancholy-looking yew-trees, or the firs, and picking up the red berries, and the fir apples, which were good for nothing but to look at; or in lying about upon the fresh grass with all the fine garden smells around me; or basking in the orangery, till I could almost fancy myself ripening too along with the oranges and the limes in that grateful warmth; or in watching the dace that darted to and fro in the fish-pond, at the bottom of the garden, with here and there a great sulky pike hanging midway down the water in silent state, as if it mocked at their impertinent friskings-I had more pleasure in these busy-idle diversions than in all the sweet flavors of peaches, nectarines, oranges, and such-like common baits of children.

"And this delight was so blended with love and reverence, that though there lay (I shame to say how few rods distant from the mansion), half hid by trees, what I judged some romantic lake, such was the spell that bound me to the house, that the idle waters lay unexplored for me; and not till late in life, curiosity prevailing over elder devotion, I found, to my astonishment, a pretty brawling brook had been the locus magnitus of my infancy." This is a charac teristic glimpse of childish nature; but the whole background and character is exquisite and unrivalled as a picture of child's life. It is what we ourselves must have felt, or something akin; and it was still so much a part Lamb himself grown up and grown old, that he has drawn it several times in his letters, and in his finished Essay.

of

The good old lady had not only Charles, but her other grandchild often down on a visit. Mary must have been there long before Charles, being some ten years older. Her room in the house was the haunted one; for there was a tradition in the district that it had been the actual scene of the story of the Babes in the Wood, whose history and that of the wicked uncle was to be seen fairly carved out in wood upon the chimney-piece of the great hall. And it was believed that an apparition of the two infants was to be seen at midnight gliding up and down the great staircase near to where she slept. But they recollected she said these good innocents would do her no harm. All this time she was suffering from a deadly cancer, which she never allowed to have the least effect upon her spirits, and her battle against the acute pain.

Of births, of titles, and intermarriages;
Relationships remote, or near of kin;
Of friends offended, family disgraced
But these are not thy praises; and I wrong
Thy honored memory, recording chiefly
Things light or trivial. Better t'were to tell
How with a nobler zeal and warmer love,
She served her heavenly Master.

The

Mary Lamb had her recollections of the place, which affected her in the same mysterious way as it did her brother. She had to attend on the austere old lady, who every morning used to nod her head very kindly, and say very graciously, "How do you do, little Mary?" The child adds, "I do not recollect that she ever spoke to me for the rest of the day, except, indeed, when Mary read the Psalms, when she would say that she never heard a child read so distinctly." But Mary's eyes were weak, and she was not allowed to try them too much. She heard the old lady then discourse of needlework, generally the history of some piece of work she had formerly done, the dates when they were begun, and when finished. If occasionally other events were spoken of, she had no other chronology to reckon by than in her recollection of what carpet, what sofa-cover, what set of chairs, were in the frame at the time. curious dream-child was dealt with in this ascetic way, as, indeed, she had been at home, so it was no change for her; and thrown upon herself, was driven to find ghostly companions in the dusty relics of the old place. She was injudiciously allowed to wander about through the old rooms and passages, and to feed her little mind with these disturbing visions. She was impressed awfully, like her brother, by the busts of the Cæsars, the tapestries, and the marble figure of a satyr, on which she laid her hand every day" to see how cold he was." Roaming over the old house, she came on a door which she tried day after day with a growing curiosity, and which at last opened and revealed a huge library. She was enchanted at this discovery; spent hours there every day alone, taking down the huge folios and turning them over. Here she found a work in large type, with some leaves torn out, and which was called "Mahometanism Explained," which she sat down to devour. Her attraction for this strange subject is explained by the fascination which one of the tapestries had for her, exhibiting Hager and Ishmael—the beauty of the youth and the forlorn state of his mother detaining her before them for hours. When she finished the story of Ishmael, which she found like a fairy tale, she passed on to Mahomet, which was full of wonders, which she accepted in all faith for the book told that all who believed these stories were Mahometans. Then she read that there was a bridge no wider than a silken thread, over which all must pass after death; and while those who were not Mahometans "would slip on one side of this bridge, and drop into the tremendous gulf that had no bottom," the poor child became perfectly unsettled as she brooded over these horrors. The image of the bridge made her giddy; though, as being a Mahometan, she felt her safety ought to be assured. When she saw her old grandmamma totter across the room, she was seized with a sudden terror; for it flashed upon her that she would never be able to get across the bridge. Then came the image of her mother, who was sure to be lost; for she concluded that there was but one copy of this work locked up in the library, and that therefore it was unknown to the rest of the world; and she became distracted as to what she ought to do-confess "that she was a Mahometan," which entailed a confession of reading without leave, or was she to remain silent, and let them so near and dear perish? The misery of the struggle actually threw the poor child into a fever, wherein she lay long, rambling about Mahometanism. A kind doctor who was sent for saw what was the matter. The child was oppressed by the severe austerity of those over her. Her mother, she says piteously, "had almost wholly discontinued talking to me," and she scarcely ever heard a word addressed to her from morning till night. The solemn granddame, the ascetic aunt of the Temple, were ill-suited to soothe such a disposition. It is plain, indeed, that the reason of this un

natural desertion, was that both she and her brother were considered "queer" children. Charles himself says bitterly that Mary's filial caresses and duties were met "too frequently with coldness and repulse;" while the grandmother was heartless enough to say often: "Polly, what are those poor crazy, moythered brains of yours thinking of always?" There is a world of childish agony revealed in this cruel reproach; and, as I have before hinted, these minute details of childish sufferings are, indeed, the life of Charles Lamb (for Mary's childhood and his were virtually one), growing up with him, in a dark, unwholesome tangle, and spreading over every action and thought of his life. Under such unfortunate treatment, it was no wonder that madness came later. The kind doctor and his wife took her away on a visit, made her play games, brought her to a fair, where she was enchanted, amused her in every way; while the lady quietly explained to her her delusion about Mahomet. She remained a month, and was restored perfectly well. These pictures of childish feeling are of rare interest, and, indeed, owe their effect to the almost acute recollections of the narrators, and the bitterness of the recollection actually overpowered filial affection; so that in many of these pictures is found a kind of reproach for such unkind treatment in this resembling Dickens. In both instances, what might seem a blemish, can be explained as a sort of irresistible protest a cry not to be suppressed.

"On

A favorite haunt of Charles was the cheerful store-room, "in whose hot window-sill" he used to sit poring over a book of poetry, with the grass-plot before the window, and the hum of the solitary wasp that hummed it in his ear. He used to have the buzzing in his ears long after. There was the stolen peach, which he recalled long after. the south wall (can I forget the hot feel of the brick-work?), lingered the one last peach. Now peaches are a fruit to which I always had, and still have, an almost utter aversion to. I know not by what demon of contradiction inspired, but I was haunted with an irresistible desire to pluck it. Tear myself as often as I would from the spot, I found myself still recurring to it, till maddening with desire (desire I cannot call it with wilfulness, rather without appetite - against appetite, I may call it), in an evil hour I reached out my hand, and plucked it. Some few raindrops just then fell; the sky (from a bright day) became overcast; and I was a type of our first parents, after the eating of that fatal fruit. I felt myself naked and ashamed, stripped of my virtue, spiritless. The downy fruit dropped from my hand, never to be tasted."

The eldest boy, John, was her favorite a bold, sensible, unimpulsive lad, who was likely "to do" in the world, and who succeeded fairly. He had none of the strained fancies of his brother and sister was a king to them; handsome, and "instead of moping about in solitary corners, like some of us," he would get upon a spirited horse, join huntsman and hounds, and was over all the country in a morning. Not but that he had an affection and sympathy for the old house too, but had too much spirit to be always shut up within it. Mary, being so much older, was sent down with Charles under her care; and he recalled that visit to a great aunt, near Wheathampstead, the wife of Farmer Gladman, a substantial old farm-house, with pigeoncote, woodhouse, orchard, the pastoral walks in "the green lanes of pleasant Hertfordshire." These visits seem to have been periodical, and kept up for some years. But at last the old granddame, worn out by her sufferings, died; and her funeral was attended by a concourse of all the poor, and by the gentry for miles round, who wished to show them respect. He treasured up also some grotesque memories of her austere treatment, which have a characteristic flavor. "She had," he says, 66 never-failing pretexts of tormenting children for their good. I was a chit then, and I well remember when a fly had got into a corner of my eye, and I was complaining of it to her, the old lady deliberately pounded two ounces or more of the finest loaf-sugar that could be got, and making me hold open the eye as wide as I could (all innocent of her purpose), she blew from delicate white paper, with a full breath, the whole saccharine contents into the part afflicted, saying, 'There,