transcribed by Lamb; others, I presume, by his old schoolfellow John Matthew Gutch, the editor on whom for friendship's sake and Wither's he bestowed the treasures of his toil and thought. The first pencilled note from his hand is a correction of another from the hand of the worthy Dr. Nott. To that estimable person these first remarks of the most exquisite critic that ever lived had been, it would appear, submitted for his observation by the judicious diffidence or deference of Mr. Gutch: with a double result of the quaintest and most delightful kind. Dr. Nott, sciolist and pedant, delivers oracular judgment on the text of Wither and the commentary of Lamb in such a tone as 'Jimmy Boyer' might have used in passing sentence on a faulty exercise shown up by Lamb or by Gutch at Christ's Hospital. Lamb, on receiving again the proof-sheets annotated by himself and now further enriched by the judicious animadversions of an elegant and reverend critic, proceeds to comment on his commentator with fantastic rapture of alternate irony and indignation. The first of these notes upon notes are temperate and business-like: but, as Dr. Nott might have observed, 'vires acquirit eundo.' Wither, for instance, having spoken of'sweet eyelids—meanly fringed with beaming hair,' evokes from the judicious Nott a reflection to the effect that this word should be explained. I think it signifies interveniently: intermediately: as veiling the lustre of the eyes.' To this ingenious suggestion Lamb is contented to reply— Meanly is simply in a mean or in moderation.' The poet, having duly glorified the jewel-gracing ears' of his mistress, thus daintily winds up his praise of them:

6

There the voice in love's meanders

Those their pretty circlings wanders,
Whose rare turnings will admit
No rude speech to enter it.

6

Lamb has very justly marked this last couplet as delicate': that the expression as constrained by the rhyme is more graceful than grammatical he has not thought it worth while to notice. When, after many passages no less deserving of praise for graceful and tender simplicity, Wither, with an unsavoury touch of the coarseness of his age, compliments his lady on using no loathsome fucus' for her complexion, ' mixed with Jewish fasting-spittles,' Explain this too unqualified': whereon-or at least, as I presume, whereafter a pen was struck through the last fourteen words, and the passage now stands thus:-'the metre and sentiments of which bear so close a resemblance' (to what we are not informed) ' and are altogether so elegant that I' (Gutch, not Lamb) 'shall be excused for the length of the quotation.' Seven stanzas and a half are then transcribed, in which there are some pretty fanciful lines, and others which limp and lag most pitifully. 'If more than my life I love thee-Thy hand, handle of perfection '---' Ah! 't's a thing far more divine'--such verses as these might soothe an ear as intolerant of dulcet rhymes' as Walt Whitman's own. The likeness of metre and sentiments does not go far beyond an occasional community of commonplace between the flowing verses of Wither and the halting verses of Silvester.

term,' demands Gutch: Leave it out,' suggests Lamb, with a broad and vehement stroke of his pencil. But a little further there are six lines so charming that I cannot but transcribe them, though undistinguished by any token of recognition or applause from Lamb.

If you mark, when for her pleasure
She vouchsafes to foot a measure,
Though with others' skill she pace,
There's a sweet, delightful grace
In herself, which doth prefer

Art beyond that art in her.

On page 70 Lamb has proposed a new reading which speaks for itself Jove's endeared Ganimed,' for the meaningless 'endured' of the text before him. Against a couplet now made famous by his enthusiastic citation of it—

Thoughts too deep to be expressed
And too strong to be suppressed—

he has written-Two eminently beautiful lines.' Opposite the couplet in which Wither mentions the poets

whose verse set forth

Rosalind and Stella's worth

Gutch (as I suppose) has written the names of Lodge and Sidney; under which Lamb has pencilled the words 'Qu. Spenser and Sidney'; perhaps the more plausible conjecture, as the date of Lodge's popularity was out, or nearly so, before Wither began to write.

The first of many puns provoked by the poor pedant's name was not flung at the reverend head of Dr. Nott till some time after the first occasion given. Wither has described with a cordial complacency the perfections of such good young men as

in midst of beauty's fires

Walk unscorched of ill desires.

Yet no such as stupid shame

Keeps from actions worthy blame:

6

whereon Dr. Nott remarks that we should perhaps read not' [such]. 'The meaning is,' continues the sententious divine, 'these chaste lovers are not deterred from unruly passion by shamefacedness, or boyish sheepishness and ignorance; for they are men, and have the passions of men. They are not coy to the impression of female beauty, though they can restrain the vehemence of their inclination.' These remarks, at once neat and appropriate, have provoked from Lamb, I regret to say, the following suggestion by way of improvement on the style of Dr. Nott's truly negative commendation: no such sort of persons neither as &c. Why not, Nott?' Lamb's natural intolerance of all empty or superfluous writing is attested-if any proof were wanting for the reader of his works-by the next

little note from his hand. Wither, after a long and flowing panegyric on his lady's virtues, exclaims

These are beauties that shall last

When the crimson blood shall waste
And the shining hair wax grey

Or with age be borne away.

The beauty of this passage,' reflects the commentator, is too apparent to need a comment.' Then why give it one?' asks Lamb, very reasonably. But he has abstained from affixing so much as a mark of admiration to a modest query which seems to deserve a word in passing. If I wound or sickness had,' says Wither,

None should for my curing run,

No, not to Apollo's son.

'Qy. Esculapius?' suggests the cautious annotator, with the diffidence of genuine scholarship.

After the reprint of Fair Virtue comes the reprint of The Shepherd's Hunting, with Lamb's well-known remarks on that most graceful poem prefixed in a clear flowing hand, and subscribed at a later date with his initials. Near the opening of the fourth eclogue is the pencilled suggestion of a new reading-mossy rocks' instead of 'massy.' A more important note is that on the couplet which affirms

That the sacred Muses can

Make a child in years, a man.

'Good motto for a life of Chatterton,' remarks Lamb; 'by a Chattertonian,' subjoins the too sarcastic Nott: who presumably regarded the marvellous boy with such eyes as Gifford and Carlyle turned asquint on Keats and Shelley. The next verses are worth transcription on their own account no less than on account of Lamb's annotation.

It is known what thou canst do,

For it is not long ago
When that Cuddy, thou, and I,
Each the other's skill to try,
At St. Dunstan's charmèd well,
(As some present there can tell)
Sang upon a sudden theme,
Sitting by the crimson stream;
Where if thou didst well or no
Yet remains the song to show.

To the fifth of these verses the following note is appended :

'The Devil Tavern, Fleet Street, where Child's Place now stands, and where a sign hung in my memory within 18' (substituted for 16) ' years, of the Devil and St. Dunstan-Ben Jonson made this a famous place of resort for poets by drawing up a set of Leges Convivales which were engraven in marble on the chimney piece in the room called

Apollo. One of Drayton's poems is called The Sacrifice to Apollo; it is addrest to the priests or Wits of Apollo, and is a kind of poetical paraphrase upon the Leges Convivales-This Tavern to the very last kept up a room with that name. C. L.'-who might have added point and freshness to this brief account by citing the splendid description of a revel held there under the jovial old Master's auspices, given by Careless to Aurelia in Shakerley Marmion's admirable comedy, A Fine Companion. But it is remarkable that Lamb-if I mistake nothas never quoted or mentioned that brilliant young dramatist and poet who divided with Randolph the best part of Jonson's mantle. No student of his critical writings will have forgotten Lamb's comment on Wither's couplet,

If thy verse doth bravely tower,

As she makes wing, she gets power;

many will presumably be glad to see it as first jotted down opposite the printed text.

'A long line is a Line we are long repeating. Mark the time, which it takes to repeat these properly. What slow movement ’— or, as first written, what Majesty' could Alexandrines express more than this?' (originally, 'more than these? What a power of overcoming difficulties is expressed in this,')

"As she makes wing, she gets power;"

'One makes a foot of every syllable. C. L.'

On the right-hand margin of the line thus immetrically printed in the text

Or the least bough's rust'ling—

Lamb has pencilled-better spell it rusteling as in Edit. 1620.'

In that rapturous melody of praise and thanksgiving to Poetry which has made the modest name and gentle genius of Wither immortal in the loving memory of all who know and cherish that 'best earthly bliss' which filled his prison-house with comfort and delight,' there occurs one verbal point of dispute on which Lamb pronounces with more decision than perhaps is wholly warrantable.

Though our wise ones call thee madness,

Let me never taste of gladness

If I love not thy madd'st fits

More than all their greatest wits.

The word 'gladness' is struck through, and sadness' substituted in the margin. Opposite is a note, afterwards cancelled, which runs thus: Edit. 1620, Sadness. In the meaning of sobriety or saneness of mind opposed to madness-Better perhaps than gladness.' A pen has been struck across this, and the following note substituted: Sadness (i.e. Sobriety or Sanity), oppos'd to madness;-gladness is quite unantithetical, and meaningless. C. L.' May I venture to

say that this view seems to me less plausible than ingenious? Sadness is of course often used, in the English of Wither's age, as simply equivalent to gravity; but such an imprecation as is conveyed by this reading has surely too singular a sound, gives too forced and grotesque a turn to the expression, for any poet to have rejected in its favour the natural and obvious word which rhyme and reason would alike have suggested, even had it never found its way into any previous edition of the text.

At the close of Wither's high-spirited and manly postscript to the poem on which, as he tells us, his publisher had bestowed the name of The Shepherd's Hunting, a passage occurs which has provoked one of the most characteristic outbreaks of wrath and mirth to be found among all Lamb's notes on Nott's notes on Lamb's notes on the text of Wither. "Neither am I so cynical but that I think a modest expression of such amorous conceits as suit with reason, will yet very well become my years; in which not to have feeling of the power of love, were as great an argument of much stupidity, as an over-sottish affection were of extreme folly.' In illustration of this simple and dignified sentence Lamb cites the following most apt and admirable parallel.

""Nor blame it, readers, in those years to propose to themselves such a reward, as the noblest dispositions above other things in this life have sometimes preferred; whereof not to be sensible, when good and fair in one person meet, argues both a gross and shallow judgment, and withall an ungentle and swainish breast." 'Milton-Apology for Smectymn[u]us.'

Why is this quoted?' demands the too inquisitive Nott; 'I see little similarity.' 'It was quoted for those who can see,' rejoins Lamb, with three thick strokes of his contemptuous pencil under the luckless Doctor's poor personal pronoun; on which this special note of indignation is added beneath.

'I. I. I. I. I. in Capitals!—

for shame, write your Ego thus
little i with a dot
stupid Nott!'

Thus bad begins, but worse remains behind for the Doctor. The next and last poem in the volume is An Elegiacal Epistle of Fidelia to her unconstant friend.' Towards the close of it the supposed writer expresses a hope that her doubts of her lover's fidelity may after all be groundless, and all the apparent proofs of his falsehood 'but treacherous plots of some base foes.'

'Which if it prove, as yet methinks it may,

O what a burden shall I cast away,

What cares shall I lay by—and to what height
Tower, in my new ascension to delight! 2

2 Lamb has passed by these magnificent lines without a word. I must be allowed a note of my own, to observe that there is hardly in all the range of English heroic verse an effect so noble, so majestic a touch of metre as here; not even in the poem where if anywhere we might have expected to find it-in Shelley's Epipsychidion.