common or habitual surname bestowed by that soft-sounding epithet is none other than Shakespeare himself. Gentleness such as Shakespeare's or as Lamb's implies a strength beside which the braggardism of a stoic whose Porch is of stucco, for all his swashing and martial outside of painted blood and imitated iron, proves worse than womanish weakness. Carlyle says of his friend Sterling that during his brief career as a clergyman he was ever striving with all his might 'not to be a moonshine shadow of the first Paul': it may be said-by the disbelievers in his pseudosophy-that Carlyle's own realized ideal' was to be a moonshine shadow of the first Knox. No man ever had less about him of pretention, philosophic or other, than Charles Lamb: but when he took on him to grapple in spirit with Shakespeare, and with Shakespeare's fellows or followers, the author of John Woodvil, who might till then have seemed to unsympathetic readers of that little tragedy no more than the moonshine shadow' of an Elizabethan playwright, shewed himself the strongest as well as the finest critic that ever was found worthy to comment on the most masculine or leonine school of poets in all the range of English literature. With the gentler natures among them-with the sweet spirit of Decker or of Heywood, of Davenport or of Day-we should naturally have expected him to feel and to approve his affinity; but even more than towards these do we find him attracted towards the strongest and most terrible of all the giant brood: and this by no effeminate attraction towards horrors, no morbid and liquorish appetite for visions of blood or images of agony; but by the heroic or poetic instinct of sympathy with high actions and high passions,' with the sublimity of suffering and the extravagance of love, which gave him power to read aright such poetry as to Campbell was a stumbling-block and to Hallam foolishness. Marlowe with his Faustus, Marston with his Andrugio, Tourneur with his Vindice, Ford with his Calantha, Webster, above all, with his two sovereign types of feminine daring and womanly endurance, the heroine of suffering and the heroine of sin: these are they whom he has interpreted and made known to us in such words as alone could seem deserving, for truth and for beauty, for subtlety and for strength, to be heard by way of interlude between the softer and the sterner harmonies of their Titanic text. Truly and thankfully may those whose boyish tastes have been strengthened with such mental food and quickened with such spiritual wine-the meat so carved and garnished, the cup so tempered and poured out, by such a master and founder of the feast -bear witness and give thanks to so great and so generous a benefactor; who has fed us on lion's marrow, and with honey out of the lion's mouth. To him and to him alone it is that we owe the revelation and the resurrection of our greatest dramatic poets after Shakespeare. All those who have done hard and good work in the same field, from the date of Mr. Collier's supplementary volume to

Dodsley down to the present date of Mr. Bullen's no less thankworthy collection of costly waifs and strays redeemed at last from mouldering manuscript or scarce less inaccessible print-all to whom we owe anything of good service in this line owe to Lamb the first example of such toil, the first indication of such treasure. He alone opened the golden vein alike for students and for sciolists: he set the fashion of real or affected interest in our great forgotten poets. Behind him and beneath we see the whole line of conscientious scholars and of imitative rhetoricians: the Hazlitts prattling at his heel, the Dyces labouring in his wake. If the occasional harvest of these desultory researches were his one and only claim on the regard of Englishmen, this alone should suffice to ensure him their everlasting respect and their unalterable gratitude: and this is as small a part as it is a precious one of his priceless legacy to all time. The sweet spontaneous grace of his best poetry has never been surpassed: for subtle and simple humour, for tender and cordial wit, his essays and letters have never been approached: as a critic, Coleridge alone has ever equalled or excelled him in delicacy and strength of insight, and Coleridge has excelled or equalled him only when writing on Shakespeare of Shakespeare's contemporaries Lamb was as much the better judge as he was the steadier, the deeper, and the more appreciative student. A wise enthusiasm gave only the sharper insight to his love, the keener edge to his judgment: and the rare composition of all such highest qualities as we find scattered or confused in others raised criticism in his case to the level of creation, and made his lightest word more weighty than all the labouring wisdom of any judge less gracious, any reader less inspired than Charles Lamb.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBurne.

CYCLING AND CYCLISTS.

THE Bicycle has been in existence ten or at the most twelve years. The Tricycle in its present form was invented about four years ago. During that short time they have arrived at a remarkable degree of constructive excellence; they have attracted numerous and enthusiastic votaries, and have given rise to an organisation singularly successful, and presenting several novel and remarkable features. Having, as President of this Organisation, means of information which are not generally accessible, I have been asked to give an account of it. Every one has become familiar with the appearance of the swift little vehicles that dart about the highways and byways of England, propelled by the power of human muscles alone; but it is somewhat remarkable that as yet no generic name has been assigned to them. In England the words cycling' and 'cyclists' have been found fitly to represent the pursuit and those who follow it. The Americans have adopted the term 'wheeling,' and the L.A. W., or League of American Wheelmen,' is their representative body. In Germany there is a Velocipedistenbund'; but England may be considered as the home of cycling, and it is here regulated by two institutions, called the National Cyclists' Union' and the 'Cyclists' Touring Club.' Though distinct from each other, they work together, and between them wield undisputed sway.

It is natural that machines should rapidly acquire popularity which enable a man, not otherwise assisted than by the strength that God has given him, to run a mile in two minutes and forty seconds, to travel twenty miles in an hour, and two hundred and sixty-six miles in a day. These things have been done-the first two of them several times. As athletic feats they are worthy of notice, but cycling would not have acquired its rapid popularity if it had done nothing more than afford a rapid means of locomotion. Its title to public favour is that it has opened out a new and very enjoyable form of recreation to a class of the community whose means of enjoyment are by no means too numerous, and it has also proved valuable in an economic point of view.

Reliable figures are not readily obtainable; but from information which I have been able to gather, it may be taken as a fair

approximation that between 300,000 and 400,000 persons are to be found in the ranks of habitual cyclists. The number of machines in use is also very large. Taking into account their extreme lightness, their apparent fragility, and the rough usage to which they are subjected in running at high speed over bad roads, a very large number of machines must be required to supply the original demand and to make up for wear and tear. The number placed on the market during the last ten years cannot be less than 300,000. The cost of machines ranges, as I see from a price list before me, according to the class of machine and the amount of material and labour bestowed upon it, from about ten pounds for the cheapest form of bicycle up to forty-five or fifty for smartly designed and highly finished tricycles, the most expensive being those constructed to carry two persons, and known as 'sociables.' It is evident, therefore, that a very large sum must be invested in machines alone, without counting-as, indeed, I have no means of doing with any approach to accuracy-the capital employed in the shape of plant, machinery, and stores in the factories and workshops throughout the country.

In reply to an inquiry of mine respecting the trade, a friend writes:

The trade has made wonderful strides in the past few years; and Coventry alone employs 3,000 hands. It is not a profitable business unless carried on on a large scale, with plenty of capital. Many fail yearly, for although simple enough to look at, a good machine contains from 300 to 500 separate pieces, all of which have to be accurately fitted together to prove successful. Another reason also for the high prices is, that patterns have to be altered nearly every season, and dies and tools that cost hundreds of pounds do duty for only perhaps 1,000 machines, or even less, instead of twenty times that number, as they ought.

The same gentleman says in another part of his letter, that there are 140 manufacturers who build tricycles and 145 who build bicycles as well.

In the way of literature, cycling supports several weekly newspapers, as well as some magazines and annuals. The Bicycling News began in 1876. It was followed by the Bicycle Journal, and other papers which I believe have disappeared. The Cyclist appeared first in 1879, the Tricycling Journal in 1881, and the Tricyclist in 1882. All these are now firmly established and remarkably well edited. Wheeling and the Wheel World adorn their pages with pictures, some of the portraits of wheeling celebrities in Wheeling, and the biographies with which they are accompanied, are remarkably well executed. There are also several annuals, such as Mr. Sturmey's Indispensable Handbook, both for bicycles and tricycles; and numerous works on the theory, manufacture, and mode of riding machines. One of them, which appeared lately under the name of Tricycling for Ladies, especially treats of the requirements of the weaker sex. Last,

but not least, the handbook of the Touring Club, which I mention further on, and the monthly Gazette of the same institution.

I must refer those who are curious as to the early development of the modern cycle to the pages of Mr. James Sturmey, who wrote a guide to bicycling in 1882. He says that a strange machine, consisting of a seat placed centrally upon a bar of wood and supported on wheels at each end, made its appearance in the gardens of the Luxembourg, in Paris, about the year 1808. It was propelled by a rider sitting on the seat and striking out backwards, after the manner of skaters. Caricatures of that time often represent the hobby-horse, as the machine was called. Old George Cruikshank seems to have been especially amused by them; and in many of his pictures riders of the dandy-horse figure in absurd positions. All of them, however, are apparently going at a tremendous pace, racing with railway trains, and so on. But the date of these caricatures was probably a few years later, when the dandy-horse, which speedily was laughed out of existence among the French, was revived with improvements in England. About 1830 Baron von Drais, from Frankfort-on-theMaine, seems to have taken out a patent in France for a machine he called a Draismene, which was propelled in much the same way as the hobby-horse. The Draismene had its day of popularity, and even of enthusiasm, but it soon followed the hobby-horse into the limbo of forgotten inventions. It was not till 1860-thirty years later that some unknown genius conceived the idea of affixing cranks and pedals to the front wheel of the dandy-horse. From that moment commenced the evolution of the modern bicycle. The vehicle which came into existence in 1860 was contemptuously, but not untruly, dubbed 'the bone-shaker;' and although many now living who rode on them in their youth-Lord Sherbrooke for onegot a great deal of exercise and a certain amount of amusement out of them, they were heavy, cumbrous, and perfectly awful in the way of vibration. Lord Sherbrooke, indeed, was a rider of the dandy-horse before the days of the bone-shaker. He tells the story of his race with the Oxford coach, in which for a mile he kept ahead of the mail. The driver put his horses into a gallop, but did not catch him till a rise in the ground proved too much for his wind. I asked him the other day whether I might tell the story, and he said, 'Perhaps, to be strictly accurate you ought to add that I was careful to choose ground that was just a leetle downhill.' Lord Sherbrooke would not have the smallest difficulty nowadays in performing a similar feat on a modern bicycle, which he still continues to ride. He is, I should think, the only rider of a bicycle in 1884 who rode a race on a hobby-horse in 1830. The invention which made the modern machine possible was the suspension '-wheel. Up to that time, the weight of the rider and of the carriage he sat on rested on the spoke immediately beneath the axle. This necessitated a stiff and sturdy spoke, and consequently