uthings of Lord Byron
become maudlin when we recall the sweet, life-long, heroic silence
of Charles Lamb."

"What sad, large pieces it cuts out of life," Lamb writes in 1809,--"out
of _her_ life, who is getting rather old; and we may not have many years
to live together." Once again when she was in confinement he writes:--

"It cuts out great slices of the time--the little time--we shall
have to live together. But I won't talk of death; I will imagine us
immortal, or forget that we are otherwise. By God's blessing, in a
few weeks we may be taking our meal together, or sitting in the
front row of the pit at Drury Lane, or taking our evening walk past
the theatres, to look at the outside of them at least, if not to be
tempted in. Then we forget that we are assailable; we are strong
for the time as rocks,--the wind is tempered to the shorn Lambs."

Then away on in 1833 he writes to Wordsworth:--

"Mary is ill again. Her illnesses encroach yearly. The last was
three months, followed by two of depression most dreadful. . . . I
look back upon her earlier attacks with longing,--nice little
durations of six weeks or so, followed by complete
restoration,--shocking as they were to me then."

This sister was a woman quite worthy of his devotion. Possessed of
genius somewhat akin to that of her brother, she also handled a delicate
pen, and but for her misfortune would have been well known in the world
of books. She was in complete sympathy with her brother, in heart as
well as in mind. And the record of their lives is one of the most
beautiful pictures of brotherly and sisterly affection in all
literature.

Let us turn from the dark picture, and see some of the brighter sides of
this life, sketched so far in Rembrandt-like color. Throughout all this
darkness and dread, he had joked and jested his way on, amusing his
friends in private, and entertaining the world of letters by his genial
humor. It welled up as from a hidden fountain, and that fountain never
failed but with life. So easily and spontaneously did it flow, that if
he wanted an order to see the play, for some friends, he would scribble
something like this to Ayrton:--

"I would go to the play
In a very economical sort of a way,
Rather to see
Than be seen;
Though I'm no ill sight
Neither--
By candle-light,
And in some kinds of weather,
You might pit