best years of it-saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at miscellaneous conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed, cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand; and who, in his excess of candour, declared that hẹ thought there was no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies, in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the world to do,— and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards-over a book.

There we find a good example of Lamb's power of humorous presentment, which is followed by an ingenious passage that displays the essayist at his work of analysing the intellectual constituents of a pleasure; and Lamb's analysis of the graphic instinct in man, which insists upon pictured cards rather than mere numerical symbols, gains a charm from being put dramatically as a reported discussion with this dame. Not less ingenious is the defence of mild gambling in games of mixed skill and chance for games of pure skill, played for a stake, were to Sarah Battle" a mere system of overreaching." But in games where chance entered, nothing would induce her to play for nothing.

To those puny objectors against cards, as nurturing the bad passions, she would retort that man is a gaming animal. He must be always trying to get the better in something or other: that this passion can scarcely be more safely expended than upon a game at cards: that cards are a temporary illusion; in truth, a mere drama; for we do but play at being mightily concerned where a few idle shillings are at stake, yet during the illusion we are as mightily concerned as those whose stake is crowns and kingdoms. They are a sort of dream-fighting; much ado; great battling and little bloodshed; mighty means for disproportioned ends; quite as

Z

diverting and a great deal more innoxious than many of those more serious games of life which men play without esteeming them to be such.

And then Lamb turns his hand, and glides easily into his unapproached vein of gentle egoism, touched with the tenderness of a dear affection.

With great deference to the old lady's judgment in these matters, I think I have experienced some moments in my life when playing at cards for nothing has even been agreeable. When I am in sickness, or not in the best spirits, I sometimes call for the cards, and play a game at piquet for love with my cousin Bridget-Bridget Elia.

I grant there is something sneaking in it; but with a toothache, or a sprained ankle---when you are subdued and humble--you are glad to put up with an inferior spring of action.

There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist.

I grant it is not the highest style of man-I deprecate the manes of Sarah Battle-she lives not, alas! to whom I should apologise.-

At such times, those terms which my old friend objected to, come in as something admissible—I love to get a tierce or a quatorze, though they mean nothing. I am subdued to an inferior interest. Those shadows of winning amuse me.

That last game I had with my sweet cousin (I capotted her)-(dare I tell thee, how foolish I am ?)—I wished it might have lasted for ever, though we gained nothing, and lost nothing, though it was a mere shade of play: I would be content to go on in that idle folly for ever. The pipkin should be ever boiling, that was to prepare the gentle lenitive to my foot, which Bridget was doomed to apply after the game was over; and, as I do not much relish appliances, there it should ever bubble. Bridget and I should be ever playing.

A student of style will note the exquisite cadence of the close, so unlike the obvious artifice of a rhetorical summing up. It seems to fade away,. half-baulking the ear, as if it needed a caress to complete it.

The life-long partnership of these two is not commemorated only in the essays: the Tales from

Shakspeare, jointly written by the brother and sister, which is still among the best beloved of books, witnesses to their common enjoyment. In addition to the essays we have a great store of Elia's letters, among the best in English. We have the farce Mr. H., which was played and damned -Lamb, it is said, leading the hisses. His love for the stage, testified by many passages in his writings, had not equipped him for success. his prose must be added a small but exquisite store of verse; the Lines to a Stillborn Infant (in a manner like Marvel's), the verses "When maidens such as Hester die," and above all, the unforgettable, haunting, unrhymed lyric, "I have had playmates, I have had companions," with its refrain of "the old familiar faces."

To

Lamb's style is hopeless as a model. It created itself to reproduce his whole individuality-the delight in literature which made his work a cento of allusions; the love of old quaint phrases which bred in him a desire to imitate them; with these a strong gusto for the physical side of life, its savours and relishes; but, above all, a pleasure in individual peculiarities which needed marked phrasing to emphasise them. The style is a landmark, however, and represents a reaction against the Johnsonian tradition in prose no less than the diction and metre of the Ancient Mariner or Christabel shows rebellion against the formal precision of eighteenth-century verse. A desire for colour and variety had been bred by the long-borne tyranny of logic; and Lamb's prose contained many expressions which Johnson would probably have condemned as overbold even for verse, for instance the phrase "innocent blacknesses," which he bestows on the obsolete race of boy chimney-sweepers.

CHAPTER XIX.

SHELLEY AND KEATS.

SHELLEY and Keats will always be thought of together, and not only by reason of the unhappy chance that cut them off, both in Italy, both in the first bloom of their still maturing genius. They are linked together by the circumstance that of all Shelley's longer poems none has quite the same perfection as his threnody for Adonais; but a connection even more essential lies in the fact that both are the chosen poets of youth. The youthful ferment of ideas finds in Shelley its loveliest expression; Keats is the poet of youth's mysterious troubling of the senses. One may say that Shelley gave a visionary body to creatures of the mind, even to principles; while with Keats we find the physical desire for beauty spiritualised into a splendid mystery. And certainly there are not in the history of all literature any two men who present in an extremer form the type of the poetic temperament and character.

Unlike as they were in their origin, they were alike in this, that each was born where a poet seemed the last creature likely to appear-Keats in a livery stable, Shelley in a respectable and wholly commonplace English county family. The only

son of a very rich man, and heir to a baronetcy, Percy Bysshe Shelley had all the obvious pleasures within his reach and cared for none of them. Beautiful as an angel and almost as incongruous in ordinary society, he was sent to school, the appointed place of torment for any eccentric and sensitive lad. At Eton he learnt the classics as if by instinct, but his passion was for dabbling in science, and for literature. He was precocious in writing, but not in talent, for his first books, two romances published before he left school, are worthless. At Oxford he formed a momentous friendship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, a man of remarkable and most unpoetic talents, who has left us a wonderful picture of the strange and unearthly youth who was so studious yet so irregular, and above all so impassioned in discussion. One may quote the mature opinion of this very cynical and experienced observer.

In no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley; in no being was the perception of right and wrong more acute. As his love of intellectual pursuits was vehement and the vigour of his genius almost celestial, so were the purity and sanctity of his life conspicuous.

Yet this very sense of right was destined to lead him into action after action that outraged the moral sense of much less scrupulous persons. A touching faith in the power of the human mind to arrive at accurate conclusions, a noble readiness, in his own case, to act on them, always marked Shelley; and when at the age of nineteen he had convinced himself of The Necessity of Atheism, it appeared to him only proper to publish his views in pamphlet form for the benefit of mankind. For this offence he was sent down from the university-where no one seems to have realised that the case demanded