The list might be extended and improved if there were added to it a selection from the leading journals of the United States, of Canada, of Australia, and of India; and it would be rendered still more complete and representative if it included the names of the most notable journals of Germany, Austria, Italy, Belgium, France, and Spain. Yet, when such a list had been drawn up and pronounced to be at once fair and full, it would be found that no single newspaper named therein fulfilled the conditions of an ideal newspaper so well as The Times. It is not perfect. Before its second centenary arrives it may be as much in advance of its existing excellence as it is now superior to its condition when it was first published a century ago. A leading journal must either go forward or else fall behind and disappear. The Times is now in the van of the newspaper press of the world. Its position is unique. Thirty years have elapsed since Sir Bulwer Lytton paid it a compliment in the House of Commons which no other newspaper ever received in a legislative assembly—a compliment which, though apparently extravagant, was generally admitted to be well deserved. As the words then spoken by Sir Bulwer Lytton have gained point and appropriateness in their general as well as in their particular application, I may fitly reproduce them: 'The existing newspaper press is an honour to this country, from the ability of its compositions, the integrity of the men who adorn it, the vast and various information it diffuses, and, making fair allowances for the heat of party spirit and the temptations of anonymous power, for its general exemption from wilful calumny and personal slander. And if I desired to leave to remote posterity some memorial of existing British civilisation, I would prefer, not our docks, not our railways, not our public buildings, not even the palace in which we hold our sittings: I would prefer a file of The Times.' W. FRASER RAE. VOL. XVII.-No. 95 F CHARLES LAMB and GEORGE WITHER. THE most beloved of English writers may be Goldsmith or may be Scott: the best beloved will always be Charles Lamb. His claim and his charm, for those who can feel them at all, are incomparable with any other man's. The more we consider any possible points of comparison, any plausible shades of likeness, which may seem to suggest or to establish the fact of his spiritual kinship with greater or lesser humourists before him or after-with Sterne (for example) among his precursors, or with Hood among his successors, the more we are convinced, the more we are certified of the truth, that in all those qualities which most endear his memory to us all he holds really of no man but himself. It is impossible merely to like him: you must, as Wordsworth bade the red breast whom he saw chasing the butterfly, Love him, or leave him alone. All men worthy to know him would seem always to have loved him in proportion to their worthiness; and this inevitable affection would seem again to have given them for a time the very qualities most wanting to their usual habit of mind. It fixed the inconstancy of Coleridge it softened the austerity of Wordsworth. It withdrew for a moment the author of The Friend from contemplation of metaphysics, and the author of The Prelude from meditation on himself. Nor was the converse of this testimony wanting to the completeness of the evidence afforded, the perfection of the tribute paid him. To the currish man of parts, to the selfish man of genius, a man so upright and unselfish, so single-hearted and clear-spirited, must indeed have seemed pitiable and contemptible. The sycophant Moore and the backbiter Carlyle have added what it was in them to add to the memorial raised by Wordsworth: the witness of the toad and the homage of the scorpion to a creature that would not crawl and could not sting. This indeed was not wanted, but it is as well that it should not be wanting. Their distaste and their disdain may serve to enhance yet more the value, to justify yet further the expression, of Shelley's and of Landor's most reverent and most ardent sympathy. Between Lamb and these two greater poets there was as wide and deep a gulf of difference as could well exist between men of genius : the bond between them was that of community in goodness, of simple hearted and pure-minded lovingkindness. So much is easily perceptible and readily definable by any one who runs and reads: but for those whom nature has sealed of the tribe of his lovers-for those who find in his work a sweetness like no other fragrance, a magic like no second spell, in all the world of letters-there is also something less explicable or expressible in the attraction which they feel towards the slightest relic of his hand. And of this it is difficult even to write without the appearance, if not without the danger, of an overflow into gushing ebullience or an outbreak of effusive sentiment. There is something in it of so intimate a tenderness, a devotion so personal and private, an affection so familiar and so grateful, that the translation or the transference of such impressions into definite speech seems hardly more difficult as a task than indelicate as an attempt. The exquisite humour, the womanly tenderness, which inform and imbue each other with perfect life and faultless grace beyond reach of any art but that which itself is nature; the matchless refinement of his criticism, the incomparable spontaneity of his style; all these it is easy, if it is not impertinent, to praise the something within or beyond all these which possibly may appeal but to few can assuredly be defined by none. A more acceptable service than any futile attempt at definition of the indefinable is rendered by any one who gives us but one grain or one drop more from the siftings of his granary or the runnings of his well: provided that these have in them the pure and genuine flavour of the special soil. A very few relics-two or three at most-have been preserved, and even foisted into certain recent editions, with which his truest lovers would be the readiest to dispense. But these are not among the spontaneous effusions of his natural mind: they are avowedly and obviously the forced products of unenjoying labour or of merriment for once uninspired. Cancel these, with a few imitative sentimentalities of his earliest versifying days, and there will remain of him nothing that may not be treasured and enjoyed for ever. But if there be one part of his work more delightful than another-more delightful (if that be possible) than the very Essays of Elia-it is to be found by readers. who are fit to relish it in those fugitive notes and marginal observations which have all the bright fine freedom of his most fanciful letters, and all the clear swift insight of his subtlest criticisms. For their behoof only who feel as I feel the charm of the slightest and lightest among such fragments of commentary and strays of annota-tion, I have undertaken to give a fuller account than has yet been given of Lamb's remarks on Wither and his editors or critics. To others the task will seem idle, the result of it a profitless collection. of 'trivial fond records'; a gleaning after harvest, a skimming of skimmed milk. Those only will care to glance at it for whom alone. it is intended: those only who would treasure the slightest and/ hastiest scratch of the writer's pen which carried with it the evidence of spontaneous enthusiasm or irritation, of unconsidered emotion or unprompted mirth. There are now before me the two volumes of selections from the lyric and satiric poems of George Wither, rather meanly printed, in small octavo proof-sheets, interleaved with quarto sheets of rough thin paper, which are made precious by the manuscript commentary of Lamb. The second fly-leaf of the first volume bears the inscription, 'Jas Pulham Esq. from Charles Lamb.' A proof impression of the well-known profile sketch of Lamb by Pulham has been inserted between this and the preceding fly-leaf. The same place is occupied in the second volume by the original pencil drawing, to which is attached an engraving of it 'Scratched on Copper by his Friend Brook Pulham'; and on the fly-leaf following is a second inscription"James Pulham Esq. from his friend Chas Lamb.' On the reverse of the leaf inscribed with these names in the first volume begins the commentary afterwards republished, with slight alterations and transpositions, as an essay on the poetical works of George Wither.' The opening sentence of this commentary is all but identical with the sixth paragraph of that essay in the latest and the best edition of Lamb's works; some slight modification being made necessary by the change which gave precedence to his remarks on Wither's satires over those on his lyrical poems. The original manuscript begins exactly thus: 'Fair Virtue, or the Mistress of Philarete. "There is singular beauty in the construction of this poem; it is in substance a Panegyric,' and so on, as in the published text, where however the first words of commendation do not reappear. Another sentence, originally interpolated after the first four lines given as a sample of the text, has been cancelled, it would seem, so as not to intercept the flow or impair the impression of the lyric verse. "Nay, I muse her servants are not Pleading love; but O! they dare not. They do not grow sick and die." "His way of accounting for this is so ingenious, so philosophical on the principles of love, that I am tempted to transcribe it.' This however need not here be done again, as all readers will have read it in Lamb's essay, whither all worthy of such reading will gladly turn to look for it once more. The lovely six verses beginning, 'Stars indeed fair creatures be,' are carefully underlined in this manuscript. After the quotation from Drayton with which the printed essay coneludes, the manuscript proceeds thus : "The whole poem, for the delicacy of the thoughts, and height of the passion, is equal to the best of Spenser's, Daniel's or Drayton's love verses; with the advantage of comprising in a whole all the fine things which lie scatter'd in their works, in sonnets, and smaller addresses-The happy chearful spirit of the author goes with it all the way; that sanguine temperament, which gives to all Wither's lines (in his most loved metre especially, where chiefly he is a Poet) an elasticity, like a dancing measure; it [is] as full of joy, and confidence, and high and happy thoughts, as if it were his own Epithalamium which, like Spenser, he were singing, and not a piece of preambulary, probationary flattery.' 'Not in use,' remarks a commentator whom we here meet for the first time; bewildered by the antepenultimate word of the foregoing sentence. 'What is the meaning of this?' I doubt, however, for a reason which will soon be obvious, whether it was in deference to this piteous inquiry that Lamb thus altered the turn of his closing words or condoned by subscription of his initials the alteration which perhaps may rather be due to Gutch :-' as if, like Spencer' (sic), he were singing his own Epithalamium, and not a strain of probationary courtship.' Under these last words the initials C. L. are scrawled in a large dancing hand. Between the first and second versions of this closing sentence is a cancelled note, apparently in Lamb's earlier handwriting, on the last line of these four: I am no Italian lover, That will mew thee in a jail; It is,' says the annotator, 'a pleasing compliment which several of our Elder Poets bestow upon their fair countrywomen, that, contrary to the custom of the more Southern nations of Europe, they possess such an innate modesty, that their beauty needs not a veil to increase it.' This pleasing observation is underlined throughout, but has afterwards been struck through and through with fierce and jagged strokes of a contemptuous pen; while under it the later and unmistakable hand of Lamb has written in high upright characters the discourteous monosyllable stuff.' And certainly the original remark was rather too much in the epistolary style of Allan Clare and his sister. The earlier pages of the reprint of Fair Virtue are interleaved with copious notes, explanatory or illustrative; extracts from Withering's Botany and parallel passages from well-known or unknown poets-Spenser, Sidney, Milton, Massinger, Browne, Markham, Cook, Joshua Silvester,' and Dr. Samuel Johnson: one or two perhaps The extract given from Silvester is so long and so carefully transcribed that it may be worth a word of notice. It is thus introduced: In Joshua Silvester's translation of "Du Bartas's divine Weekes" there is a poem intitled "An Ode of the Love and the Beauties of Astrea," the metre and sentiments of which Wither has so closely imitated that the quotation in this place cannot be inappropriate.' Thus the sentence ran at first, but a hand which is recognisable even in an all but erased pencil-scratch as that of the judicious Dr. Nott has written in the margin This is much |