Lamb to Mrs. Hazlitt, show that she had 66 some notion of the force of words": "I left this unfinished yesterday, in the hope that my brother would have done it for me. His reason for refusing me was 'no exquisite reason,' for it was because he must write a letter to Manning in three or four weeks, and therefore he could not be always writing letters,' he said. I wanted him to tell your husband about a great work which Godwin is going to publish to enlighten the world once more, and I shall not be able to make out what it is. He (Godwin) took his usual walk one evening, a fortnight since, to the end of Hatton Garden and back again. During that walk a thought came into his mind, which he instantly sat down and improved upon, till he brought it, in seven or eight days, into the compass of a reasonable sized pamphlet." This was the Essay on Sepulchres. The dear, quiet, lazy, delicious month we spent with you is remembered by me with such regret that I feel quite discontented and Winterslow-sick. I assure you I never passed such a pleasant time in the country in my life, both in the house and out of it-the cardplaying quarrels, and a few gaspings for breath after your swift footsteps up the high hills excepted; and these drawbacks are not unpleasant in the recollection. We have got some salt butter to make our toast seem like yours, and we have tried to eat meat suppers, but that would not do, for we left our appetites behind us, and the dry loaf, which offended you, now comes in at night unaccompanied; but, sorry am I to add, it is soon followed by the pipe. We smoked the very first night of our arrival." Reviews have changed their character somewhat since the following was writ ten: "The Monthly Review sneers at me, and asks if Comus is not good enough for Mr. Lamb?' because I have said no good serious dramas have been written since the death of Charles the First, except 'Samson Agonistes; so because they do not know, or won't remember, that Comus was written long before, I am to be set down as an undervaluer of Milton. O, Coleridge, do kill those reviews, or they will kill us; kill all we like! Be a friend to all else, but their foe." In the following it is hard to tell which best, the criticism or the joke:— "Have you read Celebs?' It has reached "You distinguish well, in your old preface, between the verses of Dr. Johnson, of the Man in the Strand,' and that from The Babes in the Wood.' I was thinking, whether taking your own glorious lines 'And from the love which was in her soul For her youthful Romilly,' which, by the love I bear my own soul, I think have no parallel in any, the best old ballads, and just altering it to 'And from the great respect she felt For Sir Samuel Romilly,' would not have explained the boundaries of prose expression and poetic feeling nearly as well. Excuse my levity on such an occasion. I never felt deeply in my life if that poem did not make me, both lately and when I read it in MS." One of the letters to Wordsworth is se 1 Elia-like it could never be mistaken for another's without the subscription. We have only space for a paragraph or so : 66 Coleridge is absent but four miles, and the neighborhood of such a man is as exciting as the presence of fifty ordinary persons. Tis enough to be within the whiff and wind of his genius for us not to possess our souls in quiet. If I lived with him or the Author of the Excursion, I should, in a very little time, lose my own identity, and be dragged along in the current of other people's thoughts, hampered in a net. How cool I sit in this office, with no possible interruption further than what I may term material! There is not as much metaphysics in thirty-six of the people here as there is in the first page of Locke's Treatise on the Human Understanding,' or as much poetry as in any ten lines of the 'Pleasures of Hope,' or more natural Beggar's Petition.' I never entangle myself in any of their speculations. Interruptions, if I try to write a letter even, I have dreadful. Just now, within four lines, I was called off for ten minutes to consult dusty old books for the settlement of obsolete errors. I hold you a guinea you don't find the chasm where I left off, so excellently the wounded sense closed again and was healed. "N. B.-Nothing said above to the contrary, but that I hold the personal presence of the two mentioned potent spirits at a rate as high as any; but I pay dearer; what amuses others robs me of myself; my mind is positively discharged into their greater currents, but flows with a willing violence. As to your question about work, it is far less oppressive to me than it was, from circumstances; it takes all the golden part of the day away, a solid lump, from ten to four; but it does not kill my peace as before. Some day or other I shall be in a taking again. My head aches, and you have had enough. God bless you! "C. LAMB." Not less characteristic though in a different vein, are the two following, written to a friend who he had heard was suffering from rheumatism : us. TO MR. H. C. ROBINSON. "DEAR ROBINSON:- -We are afraid you will slip from us from England without again seeing It would be charity to come and see one. I have these three days been laid up with strong rheumatic pains in loins, back, shoulders. I shriek sometimes from the violence of them. I get scarce any sleep, and the consequence is, I am restless, and want to change sides as I lie, and I cannot turn without resting my hands, and so turning all my body all like a log with a lever. While this rainy weather lasts, I have no hope of allevia- 66 C. LAMB." THE COMPANION LETTER TO THE SAME. (A week afterwards.) "I do confess to mischief. It was the subt lest diabolical piece of malice the heart of man T has contrived. I have no more rheumatism than that poker. Never was freer from ali pains and aches. Every joint sound, to the tip of the ear from the extremity of the lesser circuitously here from Bury. I could not resist toe. The report of thy torments was blown the jeer. I conceived you writhing when you should just receive my congratulations. How mad you'd be. Well, it is not in my method to inflict pangs. I leave that to Heaven. Bet the existing pangs of a friend, I have a stare His disquietude crowns my exemptive. imagine you howling; and I pace across the room, shooting out my free arms, legs, &c. this way and that way, with an assurance of not kindling a spark of pain from them. I deny that Nature meant us to sympathize ☛3 agonies. Those face contortions, retur distortions, have the merriness of antics. Ne ture meant them for farce-not so pleasant the actor, indeed; but Grimaldi cries w. laugh, and it is but one who suffer to tr thousands rejoice. ... "You say that shampooing is inef But, per se, it is good, to show the art tions, extravolutions of which the anal m is capable-to show what the creature ceptible of, short of dissolution. "You are worse of nights, an't you? 1* never was rack'd, was you? I shot `! Har in authentic map of those feelings. Indeed "You seem to have the flying gout. You do not disappoint expectation. can scarcely screw a smile out of your face, many of them, being of a more familiar can you? I sit at immunity and sncer ad libi- cast, are, if possible, more delightful than tum. 'Tis now the time for you to make good those given in the former collection. We resolutions. I may go on breaking 'em for anything worse I find myself. Your doctor have preferred selecting from the lighter seems to keep you on the long cure. Precipi parts of them, with a view to attracting tate healings are never good. Don't come readers to the whole, which cannot fail of while you are so bad; I shan't be able to at- acting as a pure and healthful intellectual tend to your throes and the dumby at once. I stimulant. should like to know how slowly the pain goes off. But don't write, unless the motion will be likely to make your sensibility more exquisite. "Your affectionate and truly healthy friend, "C. LAMB. "Mary thought a letter from me might amuse you in your torment. "April 17th, 1829." We must conclude with a letter to Moxon respecting some one who had defaced or abstracted a copy of Elia : The serious part of Lamb's life, here for the first time laid bare before us, proves him to have been a laborious, resolute, frank, sincere, and warm-hearted man. It is common in speaking of him to lament some of his weaknesses-his smoking and drinking. There is a cheap sort of virtue by which we can make ourselves believe we are good by flattering ourselves that we are superior to those who are better. It would be well for many of those who are disposed to climb into heaven over "DEAR M.:-Many thanks for the books; this noble-minded suffering brother, to ask but most thanks for one immortal sentence: If themselves whether, upon the whole, they I do not cheat him, never trust me again.' I perform their parts in life so well as he did do not know whether to admire most, the wit-whether they have ever convinced or justness of the sentiment. It has my cordial approbation. My sense of meum and tuum applauds it. I maintain it, the eighth commandment hath a secret special reservation, by which the reptile is exempt from any protection from it. As a dog, or a nigger, he is not the holder of property. Not a ninth of what he detains from the world is his own. Keep your hands from picking and stealing is no way referable to his acquists. I doubt whether bearing false witness against thy neighbor at all contemplated this possible scrub. Could Moses have seen the speck in vision? An ex post facto law alone could relieve him; and we are taught to expect no eleventh commandment. The outlaw to the Mosaic dispensation-unworthy to have seen Moses behind! --to lay his desecrating hands upon Elia! Has the irreverent ark-toucher been struck blind, I wonder? The more I think of him, the less I think of him. His meanness is invisible with aid of solar microscope. My moral eye smarts at him. The less flea that bites little fleas! The great BEAST! the beggarly NIT! themselves that they were ready to follow his heroic example-or whether they have no secret vices sufficient to outweigh those of one who never concealed anything. Perhaps it was Lamb's very indulgence that preserved him sane; the "sad quandary of spirits" in one who showed so much self-command was something more than the ordinary depression of indigestion. True, it may be said that the use of wine might produce this by reaction; but Lamb had been in a mad-house before he became a drinker. May we not therefore, considering how much he accomplished with his frail body, at least forbear to harp on what after all might not have been a weakness? It is certainly most becoming, at all events, to respect the memory of one who has done so much to enlarge our minds and develop our affections. We feel grateful to Mr. Talfourd for presenting his friend in such a light that we are enabled to do so. We now know how much the fine spirit that has so amused us by its playfulness was dignified by suffering. We are now justified not only in pitying and loving our "gentle-hearted Elia," but Our extracts will show that these letters in admiring and honoring him. "More when we meet; mind, you'll come, two of you; and couldn't you get off in the morning, that we may have a day-long curse at him, if curses are not dishallowed by descending so low? Amen. Maledicatur in extremis! "C. L." G. W. P. MANABOZHO AND THE GREAT SERPENT. AN ALGONQUIN TRADITION. In almost every primitive mythology we find a character partaking of a divine and human nature, who is the beneficent teacher of men, who instructs them in religion and the arts, and who, after a life of exemplary usefulness, disappears mysteriously, leaving his people impressed with the highest respect for his institutions, and indulging in the hope of his final return among them. This demi-god, to whom divine honors are often paid after his withdrawal from earth, is usually the Son of the Sun, or of the Eternal Creator, the Great Father who stands at the head of the primitive pantheons; he is born of an earthly mother, a virgin, and often a vestal of the sun, who conceives mysteriously, and who, after giving birth to her half-divine son, is herself sometimes elevated to the rank of a goddess. In the more refined and systematized mythologies, he appears clearly as an incarnation of the "Great Father,' and partaking of his attributes-his terrestrial representative, and the mediator between him and man. He appears as Buddha in India; Fo-hi in China; Zoroaster in Persia; Osiris in Egypt; Taut in Phoenicia, and Hermes in Greece; and in each case is regarded as the great teacher of men and the founder of religion.* In the mythological systems of America, this intermediate demi-god was not less clearly recognized than in those of the old world; indeed, as these systems were less complicated, because less modified from their primitive forms, the Great Teacher appears with more distinctness. Among the savage tribes his origin and "However important may be the study of military, civil, and political history, the science is incomplete without mythological history; and he is little imbued with the spirit of philosophy, who can perceive in the fables of antiquity nothing more than the extravagances of a fervid imagination. Mythology may be considered the parent of History."-Tod's Rajasthan, vol. i., p. 538. character were, for obvious reasons, much confused, but among the more advanced semi-civilized nations he occupied a welldefined position. 66 Το Among the nations of Anahuac he bore the name of Quetzalcoatl, (interpreted Feathered Serpent,") and was regarded with the highest veneration. His festivals were the most gorgeous of the year. him, it is said, the great temple of Cholula was dedicated. His history, drawn from various sources, is as follows. The god of the Milky Way, (Tonecatlecvati, or " Serpent Sun,") the principal deity of the Aztec pantheon, and the great father of gods and men, sent a message to a vir gin of Tulan, telling her that it was the will of the gods that she should conceive a son, which she did without knowing any man.* This son was Quetzalcoatl, who was figured as tall, of a fair complexion, open forehead, large eyes, and a thick beard. He became high-priest of Tulan, introduced the worship of the gods, established laws displaying the profoundest wisdom, regulated the calendar, and maintained the most rigid and exemplary manners in h life. He was averse to cruelty, abhorred war, and taught men to cultivate the sol, to reduce metals from the ores, and many other things necessary to their welfare. Under his benign administration, the widest happiness prevailed among men. The corn grew so strong, that a single ear was a load for a man; gourds were as long as a man's body; it was unnecessary to dy cotton, for it grew of all colors; all traits were in the greatest profusion and of er traordinary size; there were also a number of beautiful and sweet singing birds. His reign was the golden ged Anahuac. He, however, disappeared suddenly and mysteriously; in what matter is unknown. Some say he died on the * Codex Vaticanus, plate 11. "Begotta," an this authority, "by the breath of God.” sea-shore, and others that he wandered | away in search of the imaginary kingdom of Tlallapa. He was deified; temples were erected to him, and he was adored throughout Anahuac. The Muyscas of Columbia had a similar hero-god. According to their traditionary history, he bore the name of Bochica. Like Quetzalcoatl, he was son of the sun, the incarnation of the great father, whose sovereignty and paternal care he emblematized. He was high-priest of Irica, and the law-giver of the Muyscas. He founded a new worship, prescribed the order and nature of the sacrifices, regulated the calendar, constituted the chiefs of the tribes, and directed the mode of choosing the high-priests, in short, he was a perfect counterpart of Quetzalcoatl, and, like him, disappeared mysteriously at Irica, which place became sacred to him after his deification. And as Cholula, the sacred city of Quetzalcoatl, was common ground, where conflicting nations worshipped in peace, at the several shrines dedicated to that divin ity, so the pilgrims to the sanctuary of Bochica at Irica, amidst the horrors of the most sanguinary warfare, were allowed to make their journeys in peace and security.* We find an analogous character in the traditionary history of Peru. At first, it is said, the inhabitants lived half-naked in holes and caves in the earth, subsisting on whatsoever came in their way, and even eating human flesh. They were without law, government, or religion, altogether, in the words of La Vega, "like so many brute beasts." The sun, deploring their miserable condition, sent down his son, Manco Capac, and his daughter, Mama Cora, the sister and wife of Manco Capac, to instruct them in religion, government, and the arts of life. They were placed on an island in lake Titicaca, which to this day is regarded of extreme sanctity, with permission to go wherever they pleased, under the sole restriction that when they should stop at any place to eat or sleep, they should there strike a little wedge of gold into the ground, and that they should at last establish themselves permanently wherever the wedge should sink in the earth. They went northward, and at last arrived at the spot where the wedge disappeared, and here, after gathering around them the savage inhabitants, they founded the imperial city of Cuzco. Manco Capac taught the natives all that was essential to their welfare, the adoration of the sun, the practice of the useful arts, and the nature of government. He died a natural death, and from him the Incas claimed their descent, and their title to sovereignty. The great festival of the sun, at the summer solstice, commemorated the advent of the beneficent Manco Capac. We have traces of a similar personage in the traditionary Votan of Guatemala, but our accounts are much more vague than in the cases above mentioned. The less civilized, but yet considerably advanced, agricultural tribes of Florida, had a similar tradition concerning a great teacher. According to Mr. J. H. Payne, (who has with great industry and zeal collected their traditions, and recorded their religious ceremonies, in a work yet unpublished,) the Cherokees had a priest and law-giver essentially corresponding to Quetzalcoatl and Bochica. "He was the greatest prophet of the Cherokees, and bore the name of WASI. He told them what had been from the beginning of the world, and what would be, and gave the people in all things directions what to do. He appointed their feasts and fasts, and all the ceremonies of their religion. He directed the mode of consecrating their priests, and choosing their chiefs. He enjoined upon them to obey his directions from generation to generation, and promised that at his death, another would take his place and continue his instructions." Among the savage tribes, we have already said, the same notions prevailed. The southern edues (priests or "medicine men") of the Californians, according to Vanegas, taught that there was a supreme creator, Niparaga, who had three sons, * Mr. Payne mentions, in a note, the interesting fact that "the sacred divining crystal of the Cherokee priests, which was sometimes called by a word (ulistua) signifying 'light,' was also called Wâsicaton-hi, the word of Wasi,' or Wasintisata, Wâsi directed them; thus intimating that it was introduced and used by Wâsi. Anciently, too, when any Cherokee was particularly distinguished for singing, the old men would say, 'He is Wâsi's singer,' 'sings like Wâsi,' or 'sings the song of Wâsi," |