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On the morning of the fourth day of the voyage, a broad bend in the river exposed to view the domes and minarets of the Tartar capital. On landing, the travellers took a drosky and drove for a mile to the city gates. After the passports were examined they passed in over smooth wooden pavements, and through handsome streets, lined with palaces, churches, convents, and fine dwellings, to the club-house of the nobles, hotels being an improvement that has not yet reached that quarter of the globe. Here the party was hospitably lodged and remained for several days, extending their acquaintance with the inhabitants. The Tartars are a fine looking, athletic race. They are intelligent and apparently good-humored. Their dress is the turban, embroidered vest, loose trowsers, and yellow boots. They are said to be the most industrious of the Emperor's subjects. They seclude their women and practice polygamy, yet Mr. Maxwell says that a Christian stranger whose respectability entitles him to attention will be invited to enter their houses, will see the wife or wives, and will, perhaps, be surprised to witness so much domestic happiness and such a degree of social and moral refinement. The fine city of Kazan is the resort of the gentry of Eastern Russia during the winter months, but during the heat of summer is almost deserted.

While Mr. Maxwell's party was there, a great fire broke out which destroyed most of the principal buildings and drove the greater part of its population into the streets. It raged with the utmost fierceness for several days, and crowds of women and children were flying unprotected in every direction, among them hundreds of noble ladies; so that "never before had Christian men so good an opportunity for catching a Tartar," and from the impression we get of their singular personal beauty, it is rather to be regretted that they did not catch a few dozen for transplanting on the banks of the Hudson.

The fire was still raging when the party set out on their return to Nischnei. From Nischnei, which was almost deserted, they returned to Moscow, and from Moscow to St. Petersburg. From St. Petersburg Mr. Maxwell took stage, about the middle of November, to Kovno, thence through Warsaw and Cracow to Vienna, where he takes leave of the reader.

The concluding portions of the volume are no less interesting than those parts we have glanced at, but as they are more personally descriptive, and as our sketch already exceeds its proposed limits, we must pass them by with a general commendation, and a word of thanks to the author for his having presented the public with an agreeable and instructive book of travels.

G. W. P.

CHARLES

WE can never forget the ardor of our early attachment for Charles Lamb. That young admiration, however, we are obliged to confess, has been, in a measure, outlived. We cannot, indeed, cease to feel a lively sympathy for one whose heart was so accessible to all gentle and humane impressions, and who ever bestowed so good-natured a regard upon all who bore the image of men. Nor is the memory of the dead lightly to be disturbed. Death removes its victims to a sanctuary where no profane step should be allowed to approach, where malice, and envy, and personal prejudice have no leave to intrude. Yet, to "speak only good of the dead" is a principle as absurd in itself, as it is (of course) incompatible with any truthful biography, history, or criticism. The historian ought to be impartial-equally ready to see and narrate the evil and the good. In no other way are the true ends of history attainable. False, one-sided chronicles fall by their own weight. They carry with them the proof of their own worthlessness. Subtract from human nature its depravity, and human nature itself at once disowns the picture. Take away all inherent goodness, and the falsity is equally manifest. Man, in the discipline and development ordained him in this life, is not advanced by the example of a perfect ideal alone. In his great struggles with evil, it is not without its use that he witnesses the imperfect and varying combat of his brother, both when he overcomes and when he is overcome. Facts are never unimportant, and (in their proper place) can never be neglected but with peril. We are by no means insensible to that delicacy of feeling which would prompt a son to pass as lightly as possible over the errors of a father, or to leave them altogether in silence; but not the less on this account does it seem to us un wise and highly culpable to write on the tombstone

LAMB.*

of one who allowed his passions and appetites to destroy him, an unqualified eulogy. Men, in this world, must and will be held responsible to society for their treatment of others and of themselves. The dead, who live no longer in influence, may well be spared the recital of their follies and crimes; but he whose memory remains, and whose vital energies are still exerted in the world of living men, through the works he has left behind, is no more exempt from a rigid scrutiny and from an impartial record of his character, than if he were really alive. Truth requires that there be no shrinking from the consequences of undeniable facts.

If this is the case in matters pertaining to biography, still more evidently is it true that the works of the dead are open to free and fair investigation, and that no one is culpable for speaking unreservedly of the literary defects and of the critical transgressions of one who has, in many respects, strong claims upon our reverence and affection. If by asserting that no criticism of Shakspeare not eminently reverential ought now to be written, Coleridge means to imply that no critic of the great dramatist should be allowed to see and to portray his errors and imperfections, we must be permitted to dissent entirely from that proposition. He is no competent critic, we believe, who writes of his subject solely as an enthusiastic disciple, or as an unqualified admirer.

The temptation to disregard all these considerations is in no case stronger, we suspect, than in speaking of such men as Goldsmith, and Robert Burns, and Charles Lamb. Men of this character are always general favorites, and there is a liability in any direction rather than that of too harsh a judgment. The mass of readers are slow to discriminate, in the same character, the elements which are good from those which are evil; and accord

The Works of Charles Lamb, to which are prefixed his Letters, and a Sketch of his Life. By THOMAS NOON TALFOURD, one of his executors. 2 Vols. 8vo. Harper & Brothers, New York. 1847.

ingly they praise or blame, for the most part, accordingly as the qualities to them most easily discernible, impress their minds favorably or otherwise, and their admiration or their censure is mostly in unquali.fied terms. But to one who aspires to explore the mysteries of human character and habit, and to trace some of the hidden fountains of existence-who has a fixed idea of an eternal right and an eternal wrong, and who is able to detect the presence of each in the conduct and among the deeds of men-something more seems desirable. The admirers of Lamb cannot, we are sure, exceed us in hearty love of all that is truly worthy in his writings; and how can they be less influenced than we by any prejudice or malice? And if we speak plainly on what we deem certain fundamental defects in his mental constitution, we shall endeavor to speak as plainly of what seems truly deserving of praise.

Charles Lamb was born in London, February 18th, 1775. His early condition was humble, and from his childhood up, he was accustomed to a "subordination," amounting almost to servility, for which our republican pride feels no great sympathy, and by which an important influence was exerted in the development of his character. His father seems to have been in the employ of a barrister of the Inner Temple, in a capacity somewhat between that of steward and servant. It was here that Lamb passed the first seven years of his life. The next seven were spent in a charity school, named Christ's Hospital. Here his previous habits of implicit deference and veneration for whatever was established and for whomsoever was ostensibly his superior, was confirmed and strengthened by the circumstances in which he was placed. Of a physical constitution naturally feeble, he took scarcely any part in the vigorous sports of boyhood, and always preferred a solitary ramble to the company of his more lively and stirring schoolfellows. His gentle deportment, however, secured him the kindness-if not the highest respect of all. During all these years, his thoughts were mainly shut up within himself. He found little sympathy with those about him, and seems not to have very earnestly sought it. His brother and sister

were, the one twelve, the other ten years, older than himself. The age of his parents was such as to render their society widely removed from that which was craved by the child and the boy. Left to his own solitary meditations, his boyish dreamscompounded of much that was wild and extravagant, never looking into the future, but always lingering among the ruins of the past-gained a power over him, which not even the severe actual experience of subsequent years could entirely

counteract.

At fourteen, Lamb saw his school companions departing to the university, and found himself obliged, with many bitter regrets, to relinquish the studies in which there had been so much relief from his loneliness-so much solid pleasure. But, unlike so many others in a similar condition, he did not give way to any repinings, or indulge in any useless denunciations of the existing order. He submitted to what was inevitable, and seems never to have imagined but that everything was just as it ought to be. We have said that his dreams were all of the past. His imagination delighted to revel among the mysterious and venerable works of antiquity: he saw no millennial days in the future. Childhood, boyhood, youth, are seasons during which the growing mind is nurtured upon visions of beauty, and splendor, and awe. All minds pass alike through this ardent and versatile state; but dreams come not alike to all. In our own day, how large is the number who, still feeding upon the visionary "elements" of their childhood, have an eye only for the future; who see no good in the past, or in the present, but only injustice and wrong; and who, so far from a noble-minded content with a state of things, however unsatisfactory, nevertheless inevitable, are forever contriving some new reform, brooding over some new system, developing some new principle of social science, which is to work a revolution in human affairs, and banish evil entirely from the world! To see only good in the past, and to shrink with dread from everything new, may be a vicious extreme, but the opposite is certainly quite as dangerous-and while it makes a man in future vision inexpressibly happy, it inevitably makes him, in present reality, inexpressibly miserable.

On leaving school, Lamb was for a while employed as an inferior clerk in an office of the South Sea Company, but, at the age of seventeen, received an appointment in the accountant's department of the East India House, in which station he remained until he was fifty years old, when he retired with a liberal pension from his employers. He died at Edmonton, near the close of the year 1734, in the sixtieth year of his age.

Such was the outward condition of the author of the celebrated "Essays of Elia." The gradual development of his literary powers, and the methods by which, in the midst of so many hindrances, he won his way to an honorable and extensive literary reputation, are topics on which, interesting as they are, it is not our purpose at present to dwell. Of the friends of his early days, (particularly Coleridge,) and of their influence in arousing and urging him forward in a literary career, nothing after all can be predicated with any certainty, which is not more or less true of the similar encouraging spirits that have beckoned on all the less independent sons of genius and misfortune. Lamb was at first, as we have seen, almost entirely without sympathy. Among his school-fellows who had removed to the University at Cambridge, he remembered Coleridge, and was still occasionally admitted to fellowship with him. He became enamored of the conversation of the more advanced scholar, and, though sympathizing not at all with his mystical tendencies, and standing entirely aloof from the visions of a Susquehanna pantisocracy, with which the heads of other members of that little group were turned, he found in him, nevertheless, many impulses and tastes in common, and the first approach (distant as they indeed always remained) to a true fellow-feeling.

Allowing something for what seems to have been a temporary mood of despondency, the following extract of a letter, written to Coleridge shortly after his marriage and removal to Bristol, probably gives a tolerably accurate view of Lamb's condition at this time:-"You are the only correspondent, and, I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society, and I am

left alone. Coleridge, I devoutly wish that fortune, which has made sport with you so long, may play one prank more, throw you into London, or some spot near it, and there snugify you for life. 'Tis a selfish but natural wish for me, cast on life's plain friendless."

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Lamb, at this time, was twenty-one. In the following year were published his few little poems, in the same volume with those of Coleridge and Lloyd. In the next year, he published Rosamund Gray," a short story, full of a kind of quiet tenderness and melancholy, such as seems to have been the prevailing mood of his mind at this period. Near the close of the year 1799, (being then in his twenty-fifth year,) he completed his tragedy of "John Woodvil." This he eagerly desired to see represented on the stage, but being denied this gratification, he consoled himself by publishing it, a year or two after. Like his preceding works, however, it received no very gentle treatment from the critics, nor much favor with the public. His next effort, aside from occasional newspaper articles, was a farce, entitled "Mr. H," which was accepted at Drury Lane, in 1806, and once acted-nearly through. Some unimportant efforts intervene between this and the first essay of "Elia," in the London Magazine, about fifteen years later. Lamb was now forty-five years old, and in these essays (mainly written during the five years following) his genius appears in its true character, and, for the first time, fitly and naturally exhibited. All his writings that precede these seem rather as an exercise and discipline of the genial power that was struggling within him, and, with perhaps two or three exceptions among his occasional poems, would hardly have been noticed at all at this day, but for the relative importance given them by their connection with the Essays.

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sphere of his own personality-of entering into the reality of another condition of life, or of catching the spirit of a character very much different from his own. He sought in vain to sink himself in the mass of humanity, and temporarily to rise, like a true dramatist, clothed in whatever individual shape he would. The author himself seems not to have been unconscious of this fact, as is plainly betrayed by the pains he has taken to fortify himself on this vulnerable point.

"I am at liberty to confess," he says, in his Preface to the collected "Essays of Elia," "that much which I have heard objected to my late friend's writings was well founded. Egotistical they have been pronounced by some who did not know that what he tells us, as of himself, was often true only (historically) of another; as in a former essay, (to save many instances,) where, under the first person, (his favorite figure,) he shadows forth the forlorn estate of a country-boy placed at a London school, far from his friends and connectionsin direct opposition to his own early history. If it be egotism to imply and. twine with his own identity the griefs and affections of another-making himself many, or reducing many unto himself-then is the skillful novel ist, who all along brings in his hero or heroine, speaking of themselves, the greatest egotist of all; who yet has never, therefore, been accused of that narrowness. And how shall the intenser dramatist escape being faulty, who, doubtless, under cover of passion uttered by another, oftentimes gives blameless vent to his most inward feelings, and expresses his own story modestly?"

Whatever logic there may be in this defence of Elia, is solely of that species denominated petitio principii. The fact that the material of these essays, in the author's own view, mainly consists of his own personal experiences, is more than implied in what we have quoted. It is the drift of his argument, indeed, that all delineators of human character and all narrators of adventure and experience, spin entirely from the accumulated stores of their own individual being; that genuine characterization consists in diversely organizing whatever their memory retains of personal good or ill fortune, and of immediate observation, and in conferring upon such organization "a local habitation and a name;" and that, therefore, since Elia has done this, just as all other writers

have done, he is entirely free from the charge of egotism. Whatever influence such a defence may have upon the minds of Lamb's unqualified admirers, with us it by no means obviates the charge we have brought against him and the class of writers to which he belonged, not only as being contemporary with them, but as in part fostered by them, and partaking largely of this same general characteristic. Nor is this a topic which we feel at liberty lightly to dismiss-bearing so directly and importantly as it seems to us to do, upon the whole literature of that somewhat remarkable period; an era ushered in by the hot-bed stimulus of a Parisian revolution, and expiring only in the repose of the conqueror in a lonely, island grave.

It is, indeed, a very superficial notion that the constant use of "the first person," however objectionable in other respects, affords any sufficient ground, considered by itself, for the charge of egotism; and the "friend," from whose defence of Elia we have already quoted, could hardly have attached so much importance to his extenuation of this fault as his words would seem to imply. The accusation is made upon principles that have a bearing widely different, and more essential than a form of expression which only a very natural circumlocution might eliminate entirely, and yet leave the spirit and character of the writing unchanged. The true point at issue is not at all touched, until reference is made-in rather a singular manner, we think-to the example of the novelist and the dramatist. The question plainly put amounts very nearly to this: Does the genuine poet or writer of fiction see all his characters through himself, and all his incidents through his own experience" making himself many, or reducing many to himself "-" under cover of passion uttered by another, giving vent to his most inward feelings"-telling "his own story modestly?"-or does he, in some proper sense of the word, create?

Of course, we are now contemplating the rule, and not the exception: yet the rule, clearly enough established on other grounds, is, for our present purpose, sufficiently proved by the exception. All the world admires the novels of Sir Walter Scott. That he stands at the head of the class of novelists, few will deny. His ro

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