to match hung across the back.

Runaway Studies.

In my edition of "Elia," illustrated by Brock, whose sympathetic pen,
surely, was nibbed in days contemporary with Lamb, there is a sketch
of a youth reclining on a window-seat with a book fallen open on his
knees. He is clad in a long plain garment folded to his heels which
carries a hint of a cathedral choir but which, doubtless, is the
prescribed costume of an English public school. This lad is gazing
through the casement into a sunny garden--for the artist's vague
stippling invites the suspicion of grass and trees. Or rather, does
not the intensity of his regard attest that his nimble thoughts have
jumped the outmost wall? Already he journeys to those peaks and lofty
towers that fringe the world of youth--a dizzy range that casts a
magic border on his first wide thoughts, to be overleaped if he seek
to tread the stars.

And yet it seems a sleepy afternoon. Flowers nod upon a shelf in the
idle breeze from the open casement. On the warm sill a drowsy sunlight
falls, as if the great round orb of day, having labored to the top of
noon, now dawdled idly on the farther slope. A cat dozes with lazy
comfort on the window-seat. Surely, this is the cat--if the old story
be believed--the sleepiest of all her race, in whose dull ear the
mouse dared to nest and breed.

This lad, who is so lost in thought, is none other than Charles Lamb,
a mere stripling, not yet grown to his black small-clothes and sober
gaiters, a shrill squeak of a boy scarcely done with his battledore.
And here he sits, his cheek upon his palm, and dreams of the future.

But Lamb himself has written of this window-seat. Journeying northward
out of London--in that wonderful middle age of his in which the Elia
papers were composed--journeying northward he came once on the great
country house where a part of his boyhood had been spent. It had been
but lately given to the wreckers, "and the demolition of a few weeks,"
he writes, "had reduced it to--an antiquity."

"Had I seen those brick-and-mortar knaves at their process of
destruction," he continues, "at the plucking of every pannel I should
have felt the varlets at my heart. I should have cried out to them to
spare a plank at least out of that cheerful storeroom, in whose hot
window-seat I used to sit and read Cowley, with the grass-plat before,
and the hum and flappings of that one solitary wasp that ever haunted
it about me--it is in mine ear