was not, he
owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and
relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to
us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at
No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the
rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated
Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which
posterity peeps in upon the company,--Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry
Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade,
dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny
Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and
Wordsworth,--and sees them discharging the severer offices of the
whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds
over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and
the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the
evening,--"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the
foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably
presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women,"
Mary Lamb.

The _terati_ Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than
their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes," pots of porter,--a noontide meal for a hodman,--and
the hour midnight! One is reminded, _a propos_ of Miss Lamb's robust
viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but
I do not," he adds, "keep a whole stud of them." To go deeper into this
matter, to speculate upon the possible germs, the first vague
intimations to the mind of Coleridge of the weird spectra of "The
Ancient Mariner," the phantasmagoria of "Kubla Khan," would be, perhaps,
over-refining. "Barry Cornwall," too, Lamb tells us, "had his tritons
and his nereids gambolling before him in nocturnal visions." No wonder!

It is not intended here to re-thresh the straw left by Talfourd,
Fitzgerald, Canon Ainger, and others, in the hope of discovering
something new about Charles Lamb. In this quarter, at least, the wind
shall be tempered to the reader,--shorn as he is by these pages of a
charming letter or two. So far as fresh facts are concerned, the theme
may fairly be considered exhausted. Numberless writers, too, have rung
the change