his career; while Mr. Proctor's long acquaintance with
Lamb becomes the setting to a more careful picture than we have yet had
of his singularly great and unselfish life; and we behold, not a study
of the man in this or that mood only, but a portrait in which his whole
character is seen. The sweetest and gentlest of hosts, moving among his
guests and charming all hearers with his stammered, inimitable
pleasantry; the clerk at his desk at the India House, and finally
released from it into a life of illimitable leisure; the quaint little
scholar of Christ's Hospital; the quaint old humorist taking his long
walks about his beloved London; the author, known and endeared by his
books; the careworn and devoted man, hurrying through the streets with
his maniac sister on his arm, to place her in the shelter of a
mad-house,--it is not some one of these alone, but all of these
together, that we remember, after the perusal of this Memoir, so
graceful in manner, so simple in style, and so thoroughly beautiful and
unaffected in spirit. There is no story from which the reader can turn
with a higher sense of another's greatness and goodness, or an humbler
sense of his own.

_Character and Characteristic Men._ By EDWIN P. WHIFFLE.
Boston: Ticknor and Fields.

If we should say this is a book that brings its author under its title,
and that he is in every page of it to the unconscious subject of his own
pen, we might sufficiently express our sense of its reality and vital
strength. But no self-introduction could be more modest or undesigned.
We know of no volume in which vigor walks with less attendance of
vanity, or less motion of covert egotism in the stalwart stride; yet the
_style_, which proverbially is the _man_, does not lack decisive stamp,
but is too peculiar to be confounded with any other. It is not flaming,
or flowing, or architectural. It is not built, but wrought, with blows
of the hammer. We should emphasize the writer's historic taste, but that
his learning is so at the service of his philosophy that it never
burdens, but only arms. There is a tough welding of principle with fact,
and fetching of opposite poles together in the constant circulation
betwixt ideas and events. Sometimes an excess of antithesis shows a
little too much the wrinkled brow of thought, striving to put more into
a sentence than it will fairly carry, and corrugating the elsewhere
smoother lines,--as in a hilly country there was said to be too much