on the sea how could they get his letters even if he did? There had been time before-before he sailed; though Delia represented that people never wrote then. They were ever so much too busy at the last and they were going to see their correspondents in a few days, anyway. The only missives that came to Francie were a copy of "The Reverberator," addressed in Mr. Flack's hand and with a great inkmark on the margin of the fatal letter, and a long note from Mme. de Brécourt, received forty-eight hours after the scene at her house. lady expressed herself as follows:

This

"MY DEAR FRANCIE,-I felt very badly after you had gone yesterday morning, and I had twenty minds to go and see you. But we have talked it over conscientiously and it appears to us that we have no right to take any such step till Gaston arrives. The situation is not exclusively ours but belongs to him as well, and we feel that we ought to make it over to him in as simple and compact a form as possible. Therefore, as we regard it, we had better not touch it (it's so delicate, isn't it, my poor child?), but leave it just as it is. They think I even exceed my powers in writing you these simple lines, and that once your participation has been constatée (which was the only advantage of that dreadful scene), everything should stop. But I have liked you, Francie, I have believed in you, and I don't wish you to be able to say that in spite of the thunderbolt you have drawn down upon us I have not treated you with tenderness. It is a thunderbolt indeed, my poor and innocent but disastrous little friend! We are hearing more of it already- the horrible Republican papers here have (as we know) already got hold of the unspeakable sheet and are preparing to reproduce the article that is such parts of it as they may put forward (with innuendoes and sous-entendus to eke out the rest) without exposing

themselves to a suit for defamation. Poor Léonie de Villepreux has been with us constantly and Jeanne and her husband have telegraphed that we may expect them day after to-morrow. They are evidently immensely émotionnés, for they almost never telegraph. They wish so to receive Gaston. We have determined all the same to be intensely quiet, and that will be sure to be his view. Alphonse and Maxime now recognise that it is best to leave Mr. Flack alone, hard as it is to keep one's hands off him. Have you anything to lui faire dire-to my precious brother, when he arrives? But it is foolish of me to ask you that, for you had much

better not answer this. You will no dou have an opportunity to say to him-whateve my dear Francie, you can say! It will matt comparatively little that you may never able to say it to your friend, with eve allowance,

"SUZANNE DE BRÉCOURT."

Francie looked at this letter ar tossed it away without reading i Delia picked it up, read it to h father, who didn't understand it, ar kept it in her possession, poring ov it as Mr. Flack had seen her po over the cards that were left whi she was out, or over the registers American travellers. They knew Gaston's arrival by his telegraphir from Havre (he came back by tl French line), and he mentioned th hour-"about dinner-time"-at whic he should reach Paris. Delia, aft dinner, made her father take her the circus, so that Francie should 1 left alone to receive her intende who would be sure to hurry round the course of the evening. The gi herself expressed no preference wha ever on this point, and the idea wa one of Delia's masterly ones, h flashes of inspiration. There wa never any difficulty about imposin such conceptions on her father. B at half-past ten, when they returne the young man had not appeared, an Francie remained only long enough say, "I told you so!" with a whi face and to march off to her roo with her candle. She locked herse in and her sister could not get at h that night. It was another of Delia inspirations not to try, after she ha felt that the door was fast. She fo bore, in the exercise of a great d cretion, but she herself in the ensui hours slept not a wink. Nevertheles the next morning, as early as t o'clock, she had the energy to dra her father out to the banker's a to keep him out two hours. It wou be inconceivable now that Gast should not turn up before the déjêun He did turn up; about eleven o'clo he came in and found Francie alor

She perceived, in the strangest way, that he was very pale, at the same time that he was sunburnt; and not for an instant did he smile at her. It was very certain that there was no bright flicker in her own face, and they had the most singular, the most unnatural meeting. As he entered the room he said "I could not come last evening; they made it impossible; they were all there and we were up till three o'clock this morning." He looked as if he had been through terrible things, and it was not simply the strain of his attention to so much

business in America. What passed

next she could not remember afterwards; it seemed only a few seconds before he said to her, slowly, holding her hand (before this he had pressed his lips to hers, silently), "Is it true, Francie, what they say (and they swear to it!), that you told that blackguard

those horrors that that infamous letter is only a report of your talk?"

"I told him everything-it's all me, me, ME!" the girl replied, exaltedly, without pretending to hesitate an instant as to what he might mean.

Gaston looked at her with deep eyes; then he walked straight away to the window and remained there in silence. Francie said nothing more. At last the young man went on, "And I who insisted to them that there was no natural delicacy like yours!"

"Well, you'll never need to insist about anything any more!" she cried. And with this she dashed out of the room by the nearest door. When Delia and Mr. Dosson returned the red salon was empty and Francie was again locked into her room. But this time her sister forced an entrance.

HENRY JAMES.

FOUR hundred and seventeen letters of Charles Lamb's, some of them never before published, in two well-printed but handy volumes, edited with notes illustrative, explanatory, and biographical, by Canon Ainger, and supplied with an admirable index, are surely things to be thankful for and to be desired. No doubt the price is prohibitory. They will cost you in cash, these two volumes, full as they are from title-page to colophon with the sweetness and nobility, the mirth and the melancholy of their author's life, touched as every page of them is with traces of a hard fate bravely borne, seven shillings and sixpence. None but American millionaires and foolish book-collectors can bear such a strain upon their purses. It is the cab-fare to and from a couple of dull dinnerparties. But Mudie is in our midst, ever ready to supply our very modest intellectual wants at so much a quarter, and ward off the catastrophe so dreaded by all dust-hating housewives, the accumulation of those "nasty books," for which indeed but slender accommodation is provided in our upholstered households. Yet these volumes, however acquired, whether. by purchase, and therefore destined. to remain by your side ready to be handled whenever the mood seizes you, or borrowed from a library to be returned at the week's end along with the last new novel people are painfully talking about, cannot fail to excite the interest and stir the emotions of all lovers of sound literature and true men.

But first of all, Canon Ainger is to

1 Letters of Charles Lamb. Newly arranged, with additions; and a New Portrait. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. Alfred Ainger, M.A., Canon of Bristol. 2 vols. London, 1888.

be congratulated on the completion of his task. He told us he was going to edit Lamb's Works and Letters, and naturally one believed him; but in this world there is nothing so satisfactory as performance. To see a good work, well planned, well executed, and entirely finished by the same hand that penned, and the same mind that conceived, the original scheme, has something about it which is surprisingly gratifying to the soul of man, accustomed as he is to the wreckage of projects and the failure of hopes. Canon Ainger's edition of "Lamb's Works and Letters" stands complete in six volumes. Were one in search of sentiment one might perhaps find it in the intimate association existing between the editor and the old church by the side of which Lamb was born, and which he ever loved and accounted peculiarly his own. Elia was born a Templar.

"I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said-for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places ?—these are of my oldest recollections."

Thus begins the celebrated essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." As a humble member of that honourable Society I rejoice that its Reader should be the man who has, as a labour of love and by virtue of qualifications which cannot be questioned, placed upon the library shelf so complete and choice an edition of the works of one whose memory is perhaps the pleasantest thing about the whole place.

So far as these two volumes of letters are concerned the course adopted by the editor has been, if I may make bold to say so, the right

one. He has simply edited them carefully and added notes and an index. He has not attempted to tell Lamb's life between times. He has already told the story of that life in a separate volume. I wish the practice could be revived of giving us a man's correspondence all by itself in consecutive volumes as we have the letters of Horace Walpole, of Burke, of Richardson, of Alexander Knox, and many others. It is astonishing what interesting and varied reading such volumes make. They never bore you. You do not stop to be bored. Something is always turning up sure to interest somebody. Some reference to a place you have visited; to a house you have stayed at; to a book you have read ; to a man or woman you wish to hear about. As compared with the measured malice of a set biography, where you feel yourself in the iron grasp, not of the man whose life is being professedly written, but of the man (whom naturally you dislike) who has taken upon himself to write the life, these volumes of correspondence have all the ease and grace and truthfulness of nature. There is about as much resemblance between reading them and your ordinary biography as between a turn on the treadmill and a saunter into Hertfordshire in search of Mackery End. I hope when we get hold of the biographies of Lord Beaconsfield, Lord Iddesleigh, and Dean Stanley, we shall not find ourselves defrauded of our. dues. But it is of the essence of letters that we should have the whole of each. I think it is wrong even to omit the merely formal parts. They all hang together. The method employed in the biography of George Eliot was, in my opinion-I can but state it-a vicious method. To serve up letters in solid slabs cut out of longer letters is distressing. Every letter a man or woman writes is an incriminating document. It tells a tale about him. Let the whole be read or none.

Canon Ainger has adopted the right course. He has indeed omitted a few oaths-on the principle that "damns

have had their day." For my part I think I should have been disposed to leave them alone.

"The rough bur-thistle spreading wide
Amang the bearded bear,

I turn'd my weeding-clips aside
And spared the symbol dear."

But this is not a question to discuss with a dignitary of the Church. Leaving out the oaths and, it may perhaps be, here and there a passage where the reckless humour of the writer led him to transcend the limits of becoming mirth, and mere notelets, we have in these two volumes Lamb's letters just as they were written, save in an instance or two where the originals have been partially destroyed. The first is to Coleridge, and is dated May 27th, 1796, the last is to Mrs. Dyer, and was written on December 22nd, 1834. Who, I wonder, ever managed to squeeze into a correspondence of forty years truer humour, madder nonsense, sounder sense, or more tender sympathy! They do not indeed (these letters) prate about first principles, but they contain many things conducive to a good life here below.

The earlier letters strike the more solemn notes. As a young man Lamb was deeply religious, and for a time the appalling tragedy of his life, the death of his mother by his sister's hand, deepened these feelings. His letters to Coleridge in September and October 1796 might very well appear in the early chapters of a saint's life. They exhibit the rare union of a colossal strength, entire truthfulness, no single emotion being ever exaggerated, with the tenderest and most refined feeling. Some of his sentences remind one of Johnson, others of Rousseau. How people reading these letters can ever have the impudence to introduce into the tones of their voices when they are referring to Lamb the faintest suspicion of condescension, as if they were speaking of one weaker than themselves, must always remain one of the unsolved problems of human conceit.

Lamb's religiousness wore off. He refers to this in a letter written in 1801 to Walter Wilson, and printed on page 171 of Canon Ainger's first volume:

"I have had a time of seriousness and I have known the importance and reality of a religious belief. Latterly, I acknowledge, much of my seriousness has gone off, whether from new company or some other new associations, but I still retain at bottom a conviction of the truth and a certainty of the usefulness of religion."

The fact, I suspect, was that the strain of religious thoughts was proving too great for a brain which had once succumbed to madness. Religion sits very lightly on some minds. She could not have done so on Lamb's. He took refuge in trivialities seriously, and played the fool in order to remain sane.

а

These Letters are of the same material as the "Essays of Elia." The germs, nay, the very phrases, of the latter are frequently to be found in the former. This does not offend in his case, though as a rule a good letter ought not forcibly to remind us of a good essay by the same hand. Admirable as are Thackeray's lately-published letters, the parts I like best are those which remind me least of "Roundabout Paper." The author seems to steal in, and the author is the very last person you wish to see in a letter. But as you read Lamb's letters you never think of the author: his personality carries you over everything. He manages-I will not say skilfully, for it was the natural result of his delightful character, always to address his letter to his correspondent. -to make it a thing which, apart from the correspondent, his habits and idiosyncrasies, could not possibly have existed in the shape it does. sometimes comes across things called letters which might have been addressed to anybody. But these things are not letters: they are extracts from journals or circulars, and are usually either offensive or dull.

One

Lamb's letters are not indeed model No. 344.-VOL. LVIII.

letters like Cowper's. Though natural to Lamb, they cannot be called easy. "Divine chit-chat" is not the epithet to describe them. His notes are all high. He is sublime, heartrending, excruciatingly funny, outrageously ridiculous, sometimes possibly an inch or two overdrawn. He carries the charm of incongruity and total unexpectedness to the highest pitch imaginable. John Sterling used to chuckle over the sudden way in which you turn up Adam in the following passage from a letter to Bernard Barton (vol. ii. p. 142):

"DEAR B. B.-You may know my letters by the paper and the folding. For the former I live on scraps obtained in charity from an old friend, whose stationery is a permanent perquisite; for folding I shall do it neatly when I learn to tie my neck-cloths. I surprise most of my friends by writing to them on ruled paper, as if I had not got past pot-hooks and hangers. Sealing-wax I have none on my establishment; wafers of the coarsest bran supply its place. When my epistles come to be weighed with Pliny's, however superior to the Roman in delicate irony, judicious reflections, &c., his gilt post will bribe over the judges to him. All the time I was at the E.I.H. I never mended a pen. I now cut 'em to the stumps, marring rather than mending the primitive goose-quill. I cannot bear to pay for articles I used to get for nothing. When Adam laid out his first penny upon nonpareils at some stall in Mesopotamos, I think it went hard with him, reflecting upon his old goodly orchard where he had so many for nothing."

There are not many better pastimes for a middle-aged man who does not care for first principles or modern novels than to hunt George Dyer upand-down Charles Lamb. Lamb created Dyer as surely as did Cervantes Don Quixote, Sterne Toby Shandy, or Charles Dickens Sam Weller. Outside Lamb George Dyer is the deadest of dead authors. Inside Lamb he is one of the quaintest, queerest, most humorously felicitous of living characters. Take up Canon Ainger's first volume and turn to pages 97, 123, 125, 127, 131, 133, 137, and 157. The list is happily not exhaustive, but it will be enough to add to the reader's portrait-gallery

H