plete with quaint humor and wisdom, deep as the deepness of life,- if you can do this, you will read Charles Lamb to your heart's delight; not now in your youth alone, but in your old age.

CHARLES LAMB:

GENIUS AND HUMOR

IN my lecture last Sunday evening I tried to touch the life of Charles Lamb from his cradle in the Temple Court in London to his grave in the old Church Yard at Edmonton, and to dwell with some minuteness on the terrible tragedy which struck his forlorn little home as he was just reaching his manhood and dreaming a young man's happy dreams of a home of his own in no long time, with Alice Winn, if we may guess at her full name, for his wife the girl whose blue eyes and golden hair of the true wind flower, as I take it, he would see now and then in some rare picture and speak of with a delicate safeguard cast about his secret, when he was drawing on toward old age; a home of his own with Alice for his helpmeet, and those children he would dream of who were never born because of the great tragedy, but lived all the same in his heart and peopled the little parlor hung round with prints by Hogarth, and the den, smelling so strong of tobacco, and the old folios he would kiss now and then and tell you what rare bargains they were when he bought them; or, if he could not afford the outlay when he was poor, would

tell some friend where to find the treasure because, as he says, "the next pleasure to buying a bargain for one's self is persuading a friend to buy it. It tickles one with the image of an imprudency without the penalty."

They were never born, but in twenty-five years after he had given up his hope of a home like that, and was living with his poor sister, as we heard, in a sort of double singleness, he would fall into a reverie and see them sitting there two dream children, Alice again, and John, named after his brother. "They crept about me the other evening," he says, "to hear about their great grandmother who lived in Norfolk in a great house and knew all the psaltery by heart and a deal of the New Testament, and was the best dancer in the county. How I would go to see her when I was a little boy and slept in the very same chamber where the babes slept the bad uncle left in the woods to die, and how they used to walk down the great staircase hand in hand-two little ghosts the servants said, but I never saw them myself. And then I noticed my boy, who had been somewhat scared, expanded all his eyebrows and put on a look of courage. And about my

brother who died and how I missed his kindness and missed his crossness and wished he were alive again that I might quarrel with him rather than not have him back. And then, because they wanted to hear about their dear dead mother I told them how I had courted her seven long years,

and, as much as they could understand, what coyness and denial meant in maidens, when turning to Alice the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of representment that I became in doubt which of them stood before me or whose that bright hair was. And while I sat gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, and I heard no speech but only the effects of speech whispering to me: 'We are not of Alice nor of thee, we are not children at all. We are only what might have been.' And so awaking I found myself seated in my batchelor armchair with the faithful Bridget sitting unchanged by my side."

There is a companion picture to this we have all read also who read Elia, in which one of these child angels, as he calls them, is born. But whence it came or how it came or who bid it come, or whether it came purely of its own head, no one knows. Nor were there wanting bowls of that cheering nectar mortals call caudle when the child angel was born, or the faces of women well stricken in years, so dexterous were the angels to counterfeit the kindly similitudes of earth. And the babe did not taste death because it was an angel, but it was to know weakness and reliance, and as it grew up it went with a lame gait; and pity sprang up in angelic bosoms and yearning like the human touched them at the sight of the little one who was lame.

We were watching the young man last Sun

day evening standing face to face with the great tragedy and saying to himself, "The happy dream is over and I must take care now of my poor sister and my old father while he lives, burn the journal to Alice, and the pretty sonnets, and be as a root out of a dry ground." I want to say now that we can never understand what such a resolution cost him except as we read between the lines of these papers in Elia, Dream Children and The Child Angel, that I am glad to touch also for proof of his sweeter and more subtle genius. They are the children who might have come to him in his home but for the great woe that fell on his fair youth.

It makes some men coarse and hard again to give up the happy dreams of their youth and present their bodies, as Paul says, a living sacrifice, but you have to notice how it makes Charles Lamb more tender and gracious and so wide in his sympathy and charity that his best friends were at a loss what to make of him, and would shake their wise heads and wonder what he would say or do next.

It was Lamb who first said that searching thing so many get the credit for now, as he walked through an old churchyard when he was a child and read the epitaphs, "Mary, where are all the bad people buried?" It was about as hard for him when he began to feel his way into our life to find out where the bad people lived and the bad things. Burns, among the poets, he tells us, was