mother, that doats and rests all her being upon her. There grows a love between her and a fine frank-hearted youth, Allan Clare, which is described or rather constantly implied and felt, with a world of delicacy and young devotedness. Allan had a sister, who learned to love Rosamund as he did; and one night, after the two friends had had a happy long walk about the fields and green places near the village, Rosamund, unable to get out of her head the scenes which were now endeared to her by Allan's sister as well as himself, played her grandmother for the first time in her life a little trick, and in the irrepressible and innocent enthusiasm of her heart stole out of the cottage to go over them again. Matravis, a villain, met her" Late at night he met her, a lonely, unprotected virgin-no friend at hand-no place near of refuge."-We thank the author for making this scoundrel sallow and ugly. It looks as if his physical faculties were perturbed and bad by nature, like a mistake; and that these had infected the humanity common to us all. Rosamund, "polluted and disgraced, wandered, an abandoned thing, about the fields and meadows till daybreak." She then did not go home, but laid herself down stupified at Elinor Clare's gate; and in her friend's house she soon died, having first heard that her grandmother had died in the mean while. The blind old woman-her death is thus related :

An old man, that lay sick in a small house adjoining to Margaret's, testified the next morning, that he had plainly heard the old creature calling for her granddaughter. All the night long she made her moan, and ceased not to call upon the name of Rosamund. But no Rosamund was there-like voice died away, but not till near day-break.

When the neighbours came to search in the morning, Margaret was missing! She had straggled out of bed, and made her way into Rosamund's room-worn out with fatigue and fright, when she found the girl not there, she had laid herself down to die-and, it is thought, she died praying-for she was discovered in a kneeling pos→ ture, her arms and face extended on the pillow, where Rosamund had slept the night before-a smile was on her face in death.

As to Rosamund, she scarcely uttered a word thence forward. "She expired in the arms of Elinor-quiet, gentle, as she livedthankful, that she died not among strangers-and expressing by signs rather than words, a gratitude for the most trifling services, the common offices of humanity. She died uncomplaining."

Allan's sister, to whom Matravis had once paid his addresses though in vain, died of a frenzy-fever; and the young blighted lover himself is missed for a long while afterwards, till recognized sitting on his sister's tombstone in the village by his friend the surgeon, who is the supposed author of the book. His goodness, his sympathy with his fellow-crea+ tures had survived his happiness; and he was still the same gentle yet manly creature as ever. His great enjoyment, his "wayward pleasure, for he refused to name it a virtue," was in visiting hospitals, and unostentatiously contriving to do personal and pecuniary services to the most wretched. The surgeon was called one night to attend the dying bed of a man of the name of Matravis. Allan went with him, to give the miserable wretch what comfort he could: but he talked deli riously, bidding them "not tell Allan Clare," who stood shedding over him his long-repressed tears.The paper before us glimmers through our own.

The piece that follows is entitled Recollections of Christ's Hospital, and is a favourite with us on many accounts, not the least of which is,

that we had the honour of being brought up in that excellent foundation as well as Mr. Lamb himself. Our Recollections of the school were somewhat later than his; but with the exception of a little less gratitude to one individual, and of a single characteristic, which his friend Mr. Coleridge had the chief hand, we suspect, in altering, (and we trust not essentially or for the worse), we can give cordial testimony, up to that later period, of the fidelity of his descriptions. We know not how completely or otherwise they may remain; but from what we see of the Christ Hospital boys in the streets, especially of the older and more learned part of them, and from the share which some of our old school-fellows have in the present tuition, we should guess that they still apply. We extract the following passage, both as giving a general character, and as the best written in the piece. Many persons in the metropolis, though not bred up in the school, will doubtless recognize the truth of it :

The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, Iras a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools. There is pride in it, accumulated from the circumstances which I have described as differencing him from the former; and there is a restraining modesty, from a sense of obligation and dependence, which must ever keep his deportment from assimilating to that of the latter. His very garb, as it is antique and venerable, feeds his selfrespect; as it is a badge of dependance, it restrains the natural petulance of that age from breaking out into over-acts of insolence. This produces silence and a reserve before strangers, yet not that cowardly slyness which boys mewed up at 'homé will feel; he will speak up when spoken to, but the stranger must begin the conversation with him. Within his bounds he is all fire and play; but in the streets he steals along with all the self-concentration of a young monk. He is never known to mix with other boys, they are a sort of laity to him. All this proceeds, [ have no doubt, from the continual consciousness which he carries about him of the difference of his dress from that of the rest of the world; with a modest jealousy over himself, lest, by over hastily mixing with common and secular playfellows, he should commit the dignity of his eloth. Nor let any one laugh at this; for, considering the propensity of the multitude, and especially of the small multitude, to ridicule any thing unusual in dress above all, where such peculiarity may be construed by malice into a mark of disparagement-this reserve will appear to be nothing more than a wise instinct in the Blue-coat boy. That it is neither pride nor rusticity, at least that it has none of the offensive qualities of either, a stranger may soon satisfy himself by putting a question to any of these boys: he may be sure of an answer couched in terms of plain civility, neither loquacious nor embarrassed, Let him put the same question to a parish-boy, or to one of the trencher-caps in the cloisters, and the impudent reply of the one shall not fail to exasperate, any more than the certain civility, and mercenary eye to reward, which he will meet with in the other, can fail to depress and sadden him.

[We find we must still delay the conclusion of this criticism till next week.]

TO CORRESPONDENTS. love s

We are obliged to the gentleman who favoured us with the two numbers of the Cambro-Briton; and to our friend T. R. for the loan of his volume, which will come back to him in a few days.

J. W. the first opportunity. 49, 560 AU RIDE DI

The Correspondent who signs his letter with the name of a certain unhappy polemic, is, we suppose, playing a joke with it: bat any body who wishes to know the amount of our Christianity, may see it in the Examiner of Oct, 24, 1819.

5

Printed and published by JOSEPH Appleyard, No. 19, Catherine-street, Strand. Price 2d. And sold also by A. GLIDDON, Importer of Snuff, No. 31, Tavistockstreet, Covent-garden. Orders received at the above places, and by all Book. sellers and Newsmeu.

Pool No. LXX.-WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7th, 1821.

IN coming to the Essays and their masterly criticism, we must repress our tendency to make extracts, or we shall never have done. We must content ourselves with but one noble passage; and with expressing our firm conviction, that to these Essays, including remarks on the performance of Shakspeare's tragedies, and the little notices of his contemporaries originally published in the well-known Specimens of the Old English Dramatists, the public are indebted for that keener perception and more poetical apprehension of the genius of those illustrious men, which has become so distinguishing a feature among the literary opinions of the day. There was a relish of it in Seward, but a small one, nor did his contemporaries sympathize even with that. The French Revolution, which for a time took away attention from every thing but politics, had a great and new effect in rousing up the thinking faculties in every respect; and the mind, strengthened by unusual action, soon pierced through the flimsy common-places of the last half century. By degrees, they were all broken up; and though some lively critics, who saw only the more eccentric part of the new genius and confounded it with the genius itself, reedified them, they were too late, as now begins to be pretty generally felt. Mr. Lamb, whose resemblance to the old poets in his tragedy was ludicrously taken for imbecility, had sown his criticisms as well as his example against a genial day; it came; and lo and behold! the very critics, who cried out the most disdainfully against him, adopted these very criticisms, most of them, we are ashamed to say, without any acknowledgment. But he is now beginning to receive his proper praise, after waiting for it in the most quiet and unassuming manner perhaps of any writer living. The following is the passage we alluded to:-

VOL. II.

But

So to see Lear acted,-to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters in a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced in me. the Lear of Shakspeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension, but in intellectual: the explosions of his passion are terrible as a volcano: they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage; while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear, we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind blows where it listet, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old?" What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things? But the play is beyond all art, as the tamperings with it shew: it is too hard and stony; it must have love-scenes, and a happy ending. It is not enough that Cordelia is a daughter, she must shine as a lover too. Tate has put his hook in the nostrils of this Leviathan, for Garrick and his followers, the showmen of the scene, to draw the mighty beast about more easily. A happy ending!-as if the living martyrdom that Lear had gone through, the flaying of his feelings alive, did not make a fair dismissal from the stage of life the only decorous thing for him. If he is to live and be happy after, if he could sustain this world's burden after, why all this pudder and preparation,why torment us with all this unnecessary sympathy. As if the childish pleasure of getting his gilt robes and sceptre again could tempt him to act over again his misused station, if at his years, and with his experience, any thing was left but to die.

as

With the Letters under assumed signatures, some of which are in an exquisite taste of humour and wisdom united, many of our reader's are acquainted through the medium of the Reflector. Some of the pleasantries are among what may be called our prose tunes, things which we repeat almost involuntarily when we are in the humour,→ as the one for instance about the coffin handles “with wrought gripes," and the drawn battle between Death and the ornamental drops, at p. 145, vol. 2.

The undramatic mistake of the Farce at the conclusion of the volumes is, that the humour is really too entertaining and the interest too much excited not to lead to inevitable disappointment when the mys terious Mr. H, who has such a genteel horror of disclosing his name turns out to have no worse a patronymic than Hogsflesh. It is too desperate an appeal to the nominal infirmities common to g great num. bers of people. Had it been Mr. Horridface, or Mr. Hangman, or Mr. Highwayman, or Mr. Horn-owl, Hag-laugh, or Mr. Hellish, it might have been a little better; but then these would not have been so natural; in short, nothing would have done to meet so much expectations of

If we were to make a summary of Mr. Lamb's merits as a writer, we should say that there was not a deeper or more charitable observer existing. He has none of the abhorrent self-loves that belong to lesser