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idge went to Oxford, and Lamb to be a clerk in the South Sea House. Later he was transferred to the India House, from the directors of which corporation he drew a salary until he died, a period of nearly forty years.

Soon after he entered the India House, when Lamb was twenty-one, his sister Mary, ten years his senior, in a passing fit of insanity, killed her mother with a table knife. Soon after, their father died. Charles was attached to a young lady whom he hoped to marry; but he gave up his prospect in this direction, and devoted his entire life to his sister. She was confined in an asylum for a time, but soon recovered her sanity and was released upon her brother's making himself personally responsible for her. Her attacks of insanity returned many times; but she herself could feel them coming, and we read of their going hand in hand across the fields to Hoxton (the asylum). Charles himself was confined in an asylum for six weeks.

As an antidote to the blues, and an offset to the deathlike cloud always hanging over him, Lamb gathered many friends about him, and engaged in regular correspondence with some of the best known literary characters of his day. As his clerical duties did not begin until ten o'clock, and ended at four, he had considerable leisure to study and cultivate his friends. He wrote some verses that were published in a volume with Coleridge's, and composed two dramatic pieces,

With his sister he re

which were unsuccessful. wrote some of Shakespeare's plays in the form of tales for children, and that book alone of his earlier efforts has become popular. He did some editing when he was about thirty-three, after which he lapsed into literary silence for twelve years. Finally, at the age of forty-five, just five years before he was to retire from the India House on a pension, he contributed to the "London Magazine," then just rehabilitated, a paper on "The South Sea House," signing it "Elia,”

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the name of an Italian fellow-clerk of those days of twenty-five years before. The success of this paper brought forth the best of the other Essays of Elia" within a period of three years. They were in effect Lamb's letters to his friends elaborated into permanent literary form; and Lamb's collected "Letters" must stand on every bookshelf, side by side with "Elia."

Lamb's essays and letters are elaborate play, the foolery that best dispels the blue-devils with which all humanity is more or less afflicted. What he himself had found effective through a period of twenty-five years he kindly offers to us. The tragedy behind it all, in full view of which the essays were written, makes their foolishness sublime. If Lamb, by the recipe which he offers, could make his life successful and happy under the trying conditions which were forced upon him and which would certainly have wrecked a less truly noble character, what excuse have we

for being sad and lugubrious when the sun is clouded?

Probably the reason why no one has succeeded in imitating Lamb's style successfully is that no one else has been found to bear what he bore for forty years and remain so light, so sweet, so gentle, and so good.

LETTER TO COLERIDGE

March 9, 1822.

EAR C.,- It gives me great satisfaction to hear that the pig turned out so well,1 — they are interesting creatures at a certain age; what a pity such buds should blow out into the maturity of rank bacon! You had all some of the crackling and brain sauce; did you remember to rub it with butter, and gently dredge it a little, just before the crisis? Did the eyes come away kindly, with no Edipean avulsion? Was the crackling the colour of the ripe pomegranate? Had you no cursed complement of boiled neck of mutton before it, to blunt the edge of delicate desire? Did you flesh maiden teeth in it? Not that I sent the pig, or can form the remotest guess what part Owen could play in the business. I never knew him give anything away in my life. He would not begin with strangers. I suspect the pig, after all, was meant for me; but at the unlucky juncture of time being absent, the present somehow went round to Highgate. To confess

1 Some one had sent Coleridge a pig, and the gift was erroneously credited to Lamb.

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an honest truth, a pig is one of those things I could never think of sending away. Teals, widgeons, snipes, barn-door fowl, ducks, geese, your tame villatic things, — Welsh mutton, collars of brawn, sturgeon, fresh or pickled, your potted char, Swiss cheeses, French pies, early grapes, muscadines, I impart as freely unto my friends as to myself. They are but self-extended; but pardon me if I stop somewhere. Where the fine feeling of benevolence giveth a higher smack than the sensual rarity, there my friends (or any good man) may command me; but pigs are pigs, and I myself therein am nearest to myself. Nay, I should think it an affront, an undervaluing done to Nature, who bestowed such a boon upon me, if in a churlish mood I parted with the precious gift. One of the bitterest pangs I ever felt of remorse was when a child. My kind old aunt had strained her pocket-strings to bestow a sixpenny whole plum-cake upon me. In my way home through the Borough, I met a venerable old man, not a mendicant, but thereabouts, a lookbeggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me, the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I - not the old impostor - should take in eating her cake; the cursed ingratitude by which, under the colour of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously that I think I never suffered the like; and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after.

The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

Yours (short of pig) to command in everything, C. L.

A DISSERTATION UPON ROAST PIG

MANKIND, says a Chinese manuscript, which

my friend M. was obliging enough to read and explain to me, for the first seventy thousand ages ate their meat raw, clawing or biting it from the living animal, just as they do in Abyssinia to this day. This period is not obscurely hinted at by their great Confucius in the second chapter of his Mundane Mutations, where he designates a kind of golden age by the term Cho-fang, literally the Cooks' Holiday. The manuscript goes on to say, that the art of roasting, or rather broiling (which I take to be the elder brother) was accidentally discovered in the manner following. The swine-herd, Ho-ti, having gone out into the woods one morning, as his manner was, to collect mast for his hogs, left his cottage in the care of his eldest son Bo-bo, a great lubberly boy, who being fond of playing with fire, as younkers of his age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian

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