a vacant seat in his carriage, he would asked me to go along with him to Holyhead or Dublin. But even so, he would not have particularly admired my call on his purse for a chaise and four. Next I went on to ask myselfWhat if all this were conceded, and it should happen that he really was pleased, and wishing for my company to Dublin upon what principles or views did I mean to cultivate a connection of this sort? Boyish years stood upon other grounds; but, on coming to an accountable age, I knew that everywhere sprung up an impertinent question as to a young man's future destination. Up to sixteen or fifteen, a boy is ranked upon the footing of his father's rank. After that time, his rank is deduced proleptically from the probable stations which he will hold in future times.

Now, if my object was to make myself a trading Member of Parliament, certainly the connections which I had with ministerial noblemen would be of use. Through them, a borough might be had; and, that obtained, all was done for a man which he could owe to fortune the rest depended upon himself. But, supposing that personally there should be no objections, still I had seen enough of borough-disposers to know that they were not willing to give, without a consideration, something more than that of support to a particular line of politics. Lord S in particular, who in those days had some borough interest, looked upon it as 'bespoke' for family connections. And so of others. But the most signal bar to all this was, my own grievous disinclination to any mode of public, or noisy, or contentious life. Peace, liberty to think, solitude-these were the cravings of my heart. And unless I went among the nobility in the character of a demanding, insolent claimant, I knew that I had better not go at all. Inevitably the question arises-Upon what

footing is this man here? Is it his natural station? No: then at least he is an interloper; and the chances are, that he is a toad-eater and sycophant. Suppose he is not yet the known presumption that he is (a presumption of which he cannot be unaware) loads him with almost the worst reproaches of the reality. He is no sycophant; yet he is willing to stand the presumption that he is, and the consequent contempt. For what?

Every way, I saw that my own dignity, which above all things a man should scrupulously maintain, required that I should no longer go into any circles where I did not stand on my own native footing-proprio jure. Many a time had I wondered at the false conceptions of dignity which could lead Addison to think himself elevated by marriage with Lady Warwick-a husband to seek protection, as it were, from a wife! What had been abundantly right for me as a boy, ceased to be right for me. when I ceased to be a boy.

I

say,

CHAPTER III.

RECOLLECTIONS OF CHARLES LAMB.

AMONGST the earliest literary acquaintances I made was that with the inimitable Charles Lamb: inimitable, but that word is too limited in its meaning; for, as is said of Milton in that well known life of him attached to all common editions of the 'Paradise Lost,' (Fenton's, I think,) in both senses he was above imitation.' Yes; it was as impossible to the moral nature of Charles Lamb that he should imitate another, as, in an intellectual sense, it was impossible that any other should successfully imitate him. To write with patience even, not to say genially, for Charles Lamb it was a very necessity of his constitution that he should write from his own wayward nature; and that nature was so peculiar that no other man, the ablest at mimicry, could counterfeit its voice. But, let me not anticipate; for these were opinions about Lamb. which I had not when I first knew him, nor could have had by any reasonable title. Elia,' be it observed, the exquisite Elia,' was then unborn; Lamb had as yet published nothing to the world which proclaimed him in his proper character of a most original man of genius;

6

*

*Man of genius'—'man of talent.' I have, in another place, laid down what I conceive to be the true ground of distinction between genius and talent; which lies mainly in this that genius is intellectual power impregnated with the moral nature, and expresses a synthesis of

at best, he could have been thought no more than a man of talent- and of talent moving in a narrow path, with a power rather of mimicking the quaint and the fantastic, than any large grasp over catholic beauty. And, therefore, it need not offend the most doting admirer of Lamb as he is now known to us, a brilliant star for ever fixed in the firmament of English literature, that I acknowledge myself to have sought his acquaintance rather under the reflex honor he had enjoyed of being known as Coleridge's friend, than for any which he yet held directly and separately in his own person. My earliest advances towards this acquaintance had an inauspicious aspect; and it may be worth while reporting the circumstances, for they were characteristic of Charles Lamb; and the immediate result was - that we parted, not perhaps (as Lamb says of his philosophic friend R. and the Parisians) 'with mutual contempt,' but at least with coolness; and on my part, with something that might have even turned to disgust-founded, however, entirely on my utter misapprehension of Lamb's character and his manners had it not been for the winning goodness of Miss Lamb, before which all resentment must have melted in a moment.

It was either late in 1804 or early in 1805, according

the active in man with his original organic capacity of pleasure and pain. Hence the very word genius, because the genial nature in its whole organization is expressed and involved in it. Hence, also, arises the reason that genius is always peculiar and individual; one man's genius never exactly repeats another man's. But talent is the same in all men; and that which is effected by talent, can never serve to identify or indicate its author. Hence, too, that, although talent is the object of respect, it never conciliates love; you love a man of talent perhaps in concreto, but not talent; whereas genius, even for itself, is idolized. I am the more proud of this distinction, since I have seen the utter failure of Mr. Coleridge, judging from his attempt in his 'Table-Talk.'

to my present computations, that I had obtained from a literary friend a letter of introduction to Mr. Lamb. All that I knew of his works was his play of John Woodvil,' which I had bought in Oxford, and perhaps I only had bought throughout that great University, at the time of my matriculation there, about the Christmas of 1803. Another book fell into my hands on that same morning, I recollect the 'Gebir' of Mr. Walter Savage Landorwhich astonished me by the splendor of its descriptions (for I had opened accidentally upon the sea-nymph's marriage with Tamor, the youthful brother of Gebir) — and I bought this also. Afterwards, when placing these two most unpopular of books on the same shelf with the other far holier idols of my heart, the joint poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge as then associated in the 'Lyrical Ballads'-poems not equally unknown, perhaps a little better known, but only with the result of being more openly scorned, rejected—I could not but smile internally at the fair prospect I had of congregating a library which no man had read but myself. 'John Woodvil' I had almost studied, and Miss Lamb's pretty High-Born Helen,' and the ingenious imitations of Burton; these I had read, and, to a certain degree, must have admired, for some parts of them had settled without effort in my memory. I had read also the Edinburgh notice of them; and with what contempt may be supposed from the fact, that my veneration for Wordsworth transcended all that I felt for any created being, past or present; insomuch that, in the summer, or spring rather, of that same year, and full eight months before I first went to Oxford, I had ventured to address a letter to him, through his publishers, the Messrs. Longman, (which letter, Miss Wordsworth in after years assured me they believed to be the production of some person much older than I represented myself,)