ns between Shakspere and his children! In that
instance it was the daughter, the pet Judith, that was the demure
sweet Puritan, yet with a touch of her father's wit in her, and able
to enjoy all the depth of his smile when he would ask her whether
cakes and ale were to be _quite_ abolished when the reign of the
saints came in.

... To the man himself we turn, for one brief glance before laying
down the pen. In the evil times of the Restoration, in the land of
the Philistines, Agonistes but unconquerable, the Puritan Samson ended
his days. Serene and strong; conscious that the ambition of his youth
had been achieved, he begins the day with the Hebrew Bible, listens
reverently to words in which Moses or David or Isaiah spake of God.
But he attends no church, belongs to no communion, and has no form of
worship in his family; notable circumstances which we may refer, in
part at least, to his blindness, but significant of more than that.
His religion was of the spirit, and did not take kindly to any form.
Though the most Puritan of the Puritan, he had never stopped long in
the ranks of any Puritan party, or given satisfaction to Puritan
ecclesiastics and theologians. In his youth he loved the night; in his
old age he loves the sunlight of early morning as it glimmers on his
sightless eyes. The music which had been his delight since childhood
has still its charm, and he either sings or plays on the organ or
bass-violin every day. In his gray coat, at the door of his house in
Bunhill Fields, he sits on clear afternoons; a proud, ruggedly genial
old man, with sharp satiric touches in his talk, the untunable fiber
in him to the last. Eminent foreigners come to see him; friends
approach reverently, drawn by the splendor of his discourse. It would
range, one can well imagine, in glittering freedom, like "arabesques
of lightning," over all ages and all literatures. He was the prince of
scholars; a memory of superlative power waiting, as submissive
handmaid, on the queenliest imagination. The whole spectacle of
ancient civilization, its cities, its camps, its landscapes, was
before him. There he sat in his gray coat, like a statue cut in
granite. England had made a sordid failure, but he had not failed. His
soul's fellowship was with the great Republicans of Greece and Rome,
and with the Psalmist and Isaiah and Oliver Cromwell.

--From Peter Bayne in the _Contemporary Review_.

V

CHARLES LAMB, THE CLERK OF THE IND