The Works of Charles Lamb. A new edition. (With a sketch of his life by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd.)

Front matter

_£__! THE WORKS CHARLES LAMB CHAIR1LJES 1AE T E 1£ OF A H A A L _', 5 'I, /v i /i B % N«to (firAittoit. ■j_i___z_^ toil c . EDWARD MOXOII.-OVBR STREET, JDCCCI1. THE WORKS CHARLES LAMB* A NEW EDITION. LONDON : EDWARD MOXON, & CO., DOVER STREET. 1865. LONDON : BRADBUKY AND EVANS, PRINTERS, W H1TFPRIARS. TO THE REV. DERWENT COLERIDGE, M.A., PRINCIPAL OP ST. MARK'S COLLEGE. CHELSEA, THIS EDITION OK THE WORKS OF HIS FATHER'S FRIEND IS RESPECTFULLY INSCRIBED THE PUBLISHER. August, 1852. CONTENTS. LETTERS. Chapter I.— [1775 to 1796.] I'hge LAMBS PARENTAGE, SCHOOL DAYS, AND YOUTH, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OF HIS CORRESPONDENCE WITH COLERIDGE 5 Chapter IL— [179(1.] LETTERS TO COLERIDGE 11 Chapter IIL— [1797.] LETTERS TO COLERIDGE 20 Chapter IV.— [1798.] LAMB'S LITERARY EFFORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE WITH SOUTHEY . . 28 Chapter V.— [1799, 1800.]

LETTERS TO SOUTHEY, COLERIDGE, MANNING, AND WORDSWORTH ... 37 Chapter ATL— [1800.] LETTERS TO MANNING AFTER LAMB'S REMOVAL TO THE TEMPLE . . . 60 Chapter VII.— [1801 to 1804.] LETTERS TO MANNING, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE ; JOHN WOODVIL REJECTED, PUBLISHED, AND REVIEWED 68 Chapter VIII.— [1804 to 1806.] LETTERS TO MANNING, WORDSWORTH, KICKMAN, AND HAZLITT.— " MR. H." WRITTEN,— ACCEPTED— DAMNED CONTENTS. Chapter IS.— [1807 to 1814.] Page LETTERS TO MANNING, MONTAGUE, WORDSWORTH, AND COLERIDGE . - 83 Chapter X.— [1815 to 1817.] LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, AND MANNING 93 Chapter XI.— [1818 to 1820.] LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, SOUTHEY, MANNING, AND COLERIDGE . . .103 Chapter XII.— [1820 to 1823.] LETTERS TO WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGE, FIELD, WILSON, AND BARTON . . 110 Chapter XIII.— [1823.] LAMB'S CONTROVERSY WITH SOUTHEY .... . 120 Chapter XIV.— [1823 to 1825.]

LETTERS TO AINSWORTH, BARTON, AND COLERIDGE 131 Chapter XV.— [1825.] LAMB'S EMANCIPATION FROM THE INDIA HOUSE 139 Chapter XVI.— [1826 to 1828.] LETTERS TO ROBINSON, CARY, COLERIDGE, PATMORE, PROCTER, AND BARTON 144 Chapter XVII.— [1829, 1830.] LETTERS TO ROBINSON, PROCTER, BARTON, WILSON, OILMAN, WORDS WORTH, AND DYER .... . 154 Chapter XVIII.— [1830 to 1834.] LAMB'S LAST LETTERS AND DEATH . __ , . CONTENTS. IX FINAL MEMORIALS. — » — Chapter I. r«m; LETTERS OF LAMB TO COLERIDGE, IN THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1796 . . 189 Chapter II. LETTERS OF LAMB TO COLERIDGE, CHIEFLY RELATING TO THE DEATH OF MRS. LAMB, AND MISS LAMB'S SUBSEQUENT CONDITION . . . .201 Chapter III. LETTERS TO COLERIDGE AND MANNING IN LAMB'S FIRST YEARS OF LIFE WITH HIS SISTER— 1797 TO 1800 211 Chapter IV. MISCELLANEOUS LETTERS TO MANNING, COLERIDGE, AND WORDSWORTH —1800 to 1805 219 Chapter V. LETTERS TO HAZLITT, ETC.,— 1805 TO 1810 229 Chapter VI.

Preface

. The share of the Editor in these volumes can scarcely be regarded too slightly. Tlie successive publications of Lamb's works form almost the only events of his life which can be recorded ; and upon these criticism has been nearly exhausted. Little, therefore, was necessary to accompany the Letters, except such thread of narrative as might connect them together ; and such explanations as might render their allusions generally understood. The reader's gratitude for the pleasure which he will derive from these memorials of one of the most delightful of English writers is wholly due to his correspondents, who have kindly entrusted the precious relics to the care of the Editor, and have permitted them to be given to the world ; and to Mr. Moxon, by whose interest and zeal they have been chiefly collected.

He may be allowed to express his personal sense of the honour which he has received in such a trust from men, some of wnom are among the greate.-d, of England's living authors, — to Wordsworth, Southey, Manning, Barton, Procter, Gilman, Patmore, Walter Wilson, Field, Robinson, Dyer, Cary, Ainsworth, to Mr. Green, the executor of Coleridge, and to the surviving relatives of Hazlitt. He is also most grateful to Lamb's esteemed schoolfellow, Mr. Le Grice, for supplying an interesting part of his history. Of the few additional facts of Lamb's history, the chief have been supplied by Mr. Moxon, in whose welfare he took a most affectionate interest to the close of his life ; and who has devoted some beautiful sonnets to his memory. The recentness of the period of some of the letters has rendered it necessary to omit many portions of them, in which the humour and beauty are interwoven with personal references, which, although wholly free from anything which, rightly understood, could give pain to any human being, touch on subjects too sacred foi public exposure. Some of the personal allusions which have been retained, may seem, perhaps, too free to a stranger ; but they have been retained only in cases

PREFACE.

. IV in which the Editor is well assured the parties would be rather gratified than displeased at seeing their names connected in life-like association with one so dear to their memories. The italics and the capitals are invariably those indicated by the MSS. It is to be regretted that in the printed letters the reader must lose the curious varieties of writing with which the originals abound, and which are scrupulously adapted to the subjects. Many letters yet remain unpublished, which will further illustrate the character of Mr. Lamb, but which must be reserved for a future time, when the Editor hopes to do more justice to his own sense of the genius and the excellence of his friend, than it has been possible for him to accomplish in these volumes. T. N. T. Ruspet.l Square, 26//i Jutie, i6o7 LETTERS, &o. OF CHARLES LAMB.

Chapter I

lot, and discharging its duties with the most patient assiduity, he was not without literary ambition ; and having written some occasional verses to grace the festivities of a benefit society of which he was a member, was encouraged by his brother members to pub lish, in a thin quarto, " Poetical Pieces on several occasions." This volume contains a lively picture of the life of a lady's footman of the last century ; the " History of Joseph," told in well-measured heroic couplets ; and a pleasant piece, after the manner of " Gay's Fables," entitled the ft Sparrow's "Wedding," which was the author's favourite, and which, when he fell into the dotage of age, he delighted to hear Charles read.f His wife [1775 to 1796.] LAMB'S PARENTAGE, SCHOOL-DAYS, AND YOUTH, TO THE COMMENCEMENT OP HIS CORRESFONDEIs'CE WITH COLE- RIDGE.

Charles Lamb was born on 10th February, 1775, in Crown Office Eow, in the Inner Temple, where he spent the first seven years of his life. His parents were in a humble station, but they were endued with sentiments and with manners which might well become the gentlest blood ; and fortune, which had denied them wealth, enabled them to bestow on their children some of the happiest intellectual advantages which wealth ever confers. His father, Mr. John Lamb, who came up a little boy from Lincoln, fortunately both for himself and his master, entered into the service of Mr. Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, a widower, who, growing old within its precincts, was enabled to appreciate and to reward his devotedness and intelligence ; and to whom he became, in the language of his son, " his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his flapper, his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer."* Although coutented with his excuse his interference — for L. never forgot rank, where something better was not concerned.

L. was the liveliest little fellow breathing ; had a face as gay as Garrick's, whom he was said greatly to resemble ; (I have a por trait of him which confirms it;) possessed a fine turn for humorous poetry — next to Swift and Prior ; moulded heads in clay or plaster of Paris to admiration, by the dint of natural genius merely; turned cribbage-boards and such small cabinet toys to perfection ; took a hand at quadrille or bowls with equal facility ; made punch better than any man of his degree in England ; had the merriest quips and conceits ; and was altogether as brimful of rogueries and inventions as you could desire. He was a brother of the angle, moreover ; and just such a free, hearty, honest companion as Mr. Izaak Walton would have chosen to go a fishing with." * Lamb has given characters of his father (under the name of Lovel), and of Mr. Salt, in one of the most exquisite of all the Essays of Elia — " The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple."

Of Lovel, he says, '* He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal, and ' would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents. He once wrested a sword out of the hand of a man of quality that had dmwu upon him ; and pummelled him severely with the hilt of it. The swordsman had offered insult to a female — an occasion upon which no odds against him could have prevented the interference of Lovel. He would stand next day bare-headed to the same person, modestly to f The following little poem, entitled ' A Letter from a Child to its Grandmother," written by Mr. John Lamb for his eldest son, though possessing no merit beyond simplicity of expression, may show the manner in which he endeavoured to discharge his parental duties ; — " Dear Grandam, Pray to God to bless Your grandson dear, with happiness ; That, as I do advance each year, I may be taught my God to fear ; My little frame from passion free.

To man's estate from infancy ; master on account of his infirmity of speech. His countenance was mild ; his complexion clear brown, with an expression which might lead you to think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the same colour, one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the blood-stone. His step was plantigrade, which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure. I never heard his name men tioned without the addition of Charles, although, as there was no other boy of the name of Lamb, the addition was unnecessary ; but there was an implied kindness in it, and it was a proof that his gentle manners excited that kindness." was a woman of appearance so matronly and commanding, that, according to the recollec tion of one of Lamb's dearest schoolmates, " she might be taken for a sister of Mrs. Sid dons."

This excellent couple were blessed with three children, John, Mary, and Charles ; John being twelve and Mary ten years older than Charles. John, who is vividly described in the essay of Elia entitled " My Relations," under the name of James Elia, rose to fill a lucrative office in the South Sea House, and died a few years ago, having to the last fulfilled the affectionate injunction of Charles, to " keep the elder brother up in state." Mary (the Bridget of the same essay) still survives, to mourn the severance of a life long association, as free from every alloy of selfishness, as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister. " His delicate frame and his difficulty of utterance, which was increased by agitation, unfitted him for joining in any boisterous sport.

The description which he gives, in his ' Recollections of Christ's Hospital,' of the habits and feelings of the schoolboy, is a true one in general, but is more particularly a delineation of himself1 — the feelings were all in his own heart — the portrait was his own : ' While others were ail fire and play. he stole along with all the self-concentration of a young monk.' These habits and feelmgs were awakened and cherished in him by peculiar circumstances : he had been born and bred in the Inner Temple ; aud his parents continued to reside there while he was at school, so that he passed from cloister to cloister, and this was all the change his young mind ever knew. On every half holiday (and there were two in the week) in ten minutes he was in the gardens, on the terrace, or at the fountain of the Temple : here was his home, here his recreation ; and the influence they had on his infant mind is vividly shown in his description of the Old Benchers.

He says, ' I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple : ' he might have added, that here he passed a great portion of the second seven years of his life, a portion which mixed itself with all his habits and enjoyments, and gave a bias to the whole. Here he found a happy home affectionate parents, and a. sister who watched over him to the latest hour of his existence (God be with her !) with the tenderest solici tude ; and here he had access to the library of Mr. Salt, one of the Benchers, to whose On the 9th of October, 1782, when Charles Lamb had attained the age of seven, he was presented to the school of Christ's Hospital, by Timothy Yeates, Esq., Governor, as " the son of John Lamb, scrivener, and Elizabeth his wife," and remained a scholar of that noble establishment till he had entered into his fifteenth year.

Small of stature, delicate of frame, and constitutionally nervous and timid, he would seem unfitted to encounter the discipline of a school formed to restrain some hundreds of lads in the heart of the metropolis, or to fight his way among them. Rut the sweetness of his disposition won him favour from all ; and although the antique peculiarities of the school tinged his opening imagination, they did not sadden his child hood. One of his schoolfellows, of whose genial qualities he has made affectionate mention in his " Recollections of Christ's Hospital," Charles V. Le Grice, now of Treriefe, near Penzanee, has supplied me with some particulars of his school-days, for which friends of a later date will be grateful. " Lamb," says Mr. Le Grice, "was an amiable gentle boy, very sensible and keenly observing indulged by his schoolfellows and by his From vice, that turns a youth aside, And to have wisdom for my guide ; That I may neither lie nor swear, But in the path of virtue steer ; My actions generous, firm, and just, Be always faithful to my trust ; And thee the Lord will ever bless Your grandson dear, John L , the Less." memory his pen has given, in return for this and greater favours- -I do not think it extravagant to say — immortality.

To use his own language, here he ' was tumbled into a spacious closet of g( od old English reading, where he browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome .pasturaje.' He applied these words to his sister ; but there is no doubt they ' browsed ' together ; they had walked hand iu hand from a time ' extending beyond the period of their memory.' " success can, indeed, ever compensate for the want of timely nurture beneath the shade of one of these venerable institutions — for the sense of antiquity shading, not checking, the joyous impulses of opening manhood — for the refinement and the grace there interfused into the long labour of ambitious study — for young friendships consecrated by the associations of long past time ; and for liberal emulation, crowned by successes restrained from ungenerous and selfish pride by palpable symbols of the genius and the learning of ages 1 When Lamb quitted school, he was in the lower division of the second class — which in the language of the school is termed " being in Greek Form, but not Deputy Grecian."

He had read Virgil, Sallust, Terence, selec tions from Lucian's Dialogues, and Xenophon ; and had evinced considerable skill in the niceties of Latin composition, both in prose and verse. His docility and aptitude for the attainment of classical knowledge would have insured him an exhibition , but to this the impediment in his speech proved an insu perable obstacle. The exhibitions were given under the implied, if not expressed, condition of entering into the Church ; the whole course of education was preparatory to that end ; and therefore Lamb, who was unfitted by nature for the clerical profession, was not adopted into the class which led to it, and quitted school to pursue the uncongenial labour of the " desk's dull wood." To this apparently hard lot he submitted with cheerfulness, and saw his schoolfellows of his own standing depart, one after another, for the University without a murmur.

This acquiescence in his different fortune must have been a hard trial for the sweetness of his disposition ; as he always, in after life, regarded the ancient seats of learning with the fondness of one who had been hardly divorced from them. He delighted, when other duties did not hinder, to pass his vacations in their neighbourhood, and indulge in that fancied association with them which he has so beautifully mirrored in his "Sonnet written at Cambridge."* What worldly On 23rd November, 1789, Lamb finally quitted Christ's Hospital for the abode of his parents, who still resided in the Temple. At first he was employed in the South Sea House, under his brother John ; but on the 5th April, 1792, he obtained an appointment in the accountant's office of the East India Company. His salary, though then small, was a welcome addition to the scanty means of his parents ; who now were unable, by their own exertions, to increase it, his mother being in ill health, which confined her to her bed, and his father sinking into dotage.

On their comfort, however, this, and what was more precious to him, his little leisure, were freely bestowed ; and his recreations were confined to a delightful visit to the two shilling gallery of the theatre, in company with his sister, and an occasional supper with some of his schoolmates, when in town, from Cambridge. On one of these latter occasions he obtained the appellation of Guy, by which he was always called among them ; but of which few of his late friends heard till after his death. " In the first year of his clerk ship," says Mr. Le Grice, in the communication with which he favoured me, "Lamb spent the evening of the 5th November with some of his former schoolfellows, who, being amused with the particularly large and flapping brim of his round hat, pinned it up on the sides in the form of a cocked-hat.

Lamb made no alteration in it, but walked home in his usual sauntering gait towards the Temple. As he was going down Ludgate- I was not train'd in academic bowers, And to those learned strenms I nothing owe Which copious from those twin fair founts do flow ; Mine have been anything but studious hours. Yet can I fancy, wandering 'mid thy towers, Strange forms of logic clothe my admiring speech ; Old Ramus' ghost is husy at my brain ; And my skull teems with notions infinite. Be still, ye reeds of Camus, while I teach Myself a nursling, Granta, of thy lap ; My brow seems tightening with the doctor's cap, And I walk gowned ; feel unusual powers. Truths which transcend the searching schoolmen's vein, And half had stagger'd that stout Stagyritel rare fancies, ' all deftly masked like hoar antiquity'— much superior to Dr. Kenrick's ' Falstaff 's Wedding.' " The work was neglected, although Lamb exerted all the influence he subsequently acquired with more popular writers to obtain for it favour able notices, as will be seen from various passages in his letters.

He stuck, however, gallantly by his favourite protege ; and even when he could little afford to disburse sixpence, he made a point of buying a copy of the book whenever he discovered one amidst the refuse of a bookseller's stall, and would present it to a friend in the hope of making a convert. He gave me one of these copies soon after I became acquainted with him, stating that he had purchased it in the morning for sixpence, and assuring me I should enjoy a rare treat in the perusal ; but if I must confess the truth, the mask of quaintness was so closely worn, that it nearly concealed the humour. To Lamb it was, doubtless, vivified by the eye and voice of his old boon companion, forming to him an undying commentary ; without which it was comparatively spiritless. Alas ! how many even of his own most delicate fancies, rich as they are in feeling and in wisdom, will be lost to those who have not present to them the sweet broken accents, and the half playful, half melancholy smile of the writer ! hill, some gay young men, wlio seemed not to have passed the London Tavern without resting, exclaimed, 'Tlie veritable Guy! — no man of straw ! ' and with this exclamation they took him up, making a chair with their arms, carried him, seated him on a post in St. Paul's-churchyard, and there left him.

This story Lamb told so seriously, that the truth of it was never doubted. He wor<_ his three-cornered hat many evenings, and retained the name of Guy ever after. Like Nym, he quietly sympathised in the fun, and seemed to say, 'that was the humour of it.' A clergyman of tlie City lately wrote to me, ' I have no recollection of Lamb. There was a gentleman called Guy, to whom you once introduced me, and with whom I have occa sionally interchanged nods for more than thirty years ; but how is it that I never met Mr. Lamb ? If I was ever introduced to him, I wonder that we never came iu contact during my residence for ten years in Edmon ton.' Imagine this gentleman's surprise when I informed him that his nods to Mr. Guy had been constantly reciprocated by Mr. Lamb ! " During these years Lamb's most frequent companion was James White, or rather, Jem White, as he always called him.

Lamb al ways insisted that for hearty j oyous humour, tinged with Shaksperian fancy, Jem never had an equal. " Jem White ! " said he, to Mr. Le Grice, when they met for the last time, after many years' absence, at the Bell at Edmonton, in June, 1833, "there never was his hke ! We never shall see such days as those in which Jem flourished ! " All that now remains of Jem is the celebration of the suppers which he gave the young chimney-sweepers in the Elia of his friend, and a thin duodecimo volume, which he published in 1796, under the title of the " Letters of Sir John Falstaff, with a dedication (printed in black letter) to Master Samuel Irelaunde," which those who knew Lamb at the tim e believed to be his. " White's Letters," said Lamb, in a letter to a friend about this time, " are near publication.

His frontispiece is a good conceit ; Sir John learning to dance, to please Madame Page, in dress of doublet, &c, from the upper half, and modern pantaloons, with shoes of the eighteenth century, from the lower half, and the whole work is full of goodly quips aud But if Jem White was the companion of his lighter moods, the friend of his serious thoughts was a person of far nobler powers — Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was his good fortune to be the schoolfellow of that extraordinary man ; and if no particular intimacy had been formed between them at Christ's Hospital, a foundation was there laid for a friendship to which the world is probably indebted for all that Lamb has added to its sources of pleasure. Junior to Coleridge by two years, and far inferior to him in all scholastic acquirements, Lamb had listened to the rich discourse of " the inspired charity boy" with a wondering delight, pure from all envy, and, it may be, enhanced by his sense of his own feebleness and difficulty of expression.

While Coleridge remained at the University, they met occasionally on his visits to London ; and when he quitted it and came to town, full of mantling hopes and glorious schemes, Lamb became his admiring disciple. The scene of these happy meetings was a little public-house, called tlie Salutation and Cat, in the neighbourhood of Smithfield, where they used to sup, and I remain long after they had "heard the chimes at midnight." There they discoursed of Bowles, who was the god of Coleridge's poetical idolatry, and of Burns and Cowper, who, of recent poets, in that season of com parative barrenness, had made the deepest impression on Lamb. There Coleridge talked of " Fate, free-will, fore-knowledge absolute," to one who desired "to find no end" of the golden maze ; and there he recited his early poems with that deep sweetness of intonation which sunk into the heart of his hearer.

To these meetings Lamb was accustomed at all periods of his life to revert, as the season when his finer intellects were quickened into action. Shortly after they had terminated, with Coleridge's departure from London, he thus recalled them in a letter:* "When I read in your little volume your nineteenth effusion, or what you call 'the Sigh,' I think I hear you again. I imagine to myself the little smoky room at the Salutation and Cat, where we have sat together through the winter nights beguiling the cares of life with Poesy." This was early in 1796 ! and in 1818, when dedicating his works, then first collected, to his earliest friend, he thus spoke of the same meetings : " Some of the sonnets, which shall be carelessly turned over by the general reader, may happily awaken in you remembrances which I should be sorry should be ever totally extinct, — the memory ' of summer days and of delightful years,' even so far back as those old suppers at our old Inn, — when life was fresh, and topics exhaustless, — and you first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindliness."

And so he talkeo. of' these unforgotten hours in that short interval during which death divided them ! expanded into forms and hues of its own. Lamb's earliest poetry was not a faint reflection of Coleridge's, such as the young lustre of Original genius may cast on a polished and sensitive mind, to glow and tremble for a season, but was streaked with delicate yet distinct traits, which proved it an emanation from within. There was, indeed, little resemblance between the two, except in the affection which they bore towards each other. Coleridge's mind, not laden as yet with the spoils of all systems and of all times, glowed with the ardour of uncontrollable purpose, and thirsted for glorious achievement and universal know ledge. The imagination, which afterwards struggled gloriously but perhaps vainly to overmaster the stupendous clouds of German philosophies, breaking them into huge masses, and tinting them with heavenly hues, then shone through the simple articles of Unitarian faith, the graceful, architecture of Hartley's theory, and the well-compacted chain by which Priestley and Edwards seemed to bind all things in necessary connexion, as through transparencies of thought ; and, finding no opposition worthy of its activity in this poor foreground of the mind, opened for itself a bright succession of fairy visions, which it sought to realise on earth.

In its light, oppression and force seemed to vanish like the phantoms of a feverish dream ; mankind were disposed in the picturesque groups of universal brotherhood ; and, in far distance, the ladder which Jacob saw in solemn vision connected earth with heaven, " and the angels of God were ascending and descending upon it." Lamb had no sympathy with these radiant hopes, except as they were part of his friend. He clung to the realities of life ; to things nearest to him, which the force of habit had made dear ; and caught tremblingly hold of the past. He delighted, indeed, to hear Coleridge talk of the distant and future ; to see the p'alm-trees wave, and the pyramids tower in the long perspective of his style ; and to catch the prophetic notes of a universal harmony trembling in his voice ; but the pleasure was only that of admiration unalloyed by envy, and of the generous pride of friendship.

The tendency of his mind to drtect the beautiful and good in surrounding things, to nestle rather than to roam, was cherished by all the circum- The warmth of Coleridge's friendship supplied the quickening impulse to Lamb's genius ; but the germ enfolding all its nice peculiarities lay ready for the influence, and * This, and other passages I have interwoven with my own slender thread of narration, are from letters which I have thought either too personal for entire publication at present, or not of sufficient interest, in comparison with others, to occupy a portion of the space, to which the letters are limited. : doctrine respecting moral responsibility, and . the ultimate destiny of the human race. The adoption of this creed arose in Lamb from the accident of education ; he was brought up to receive and love it ; and attended, when circumstances permitted, at the chapel at Hackney, of which Mr. Belsham, afterwards of Essex Street, was then the minister.