abouts; a look-beggar, not a verbal petitionist; and in the coxcombry of taught-charity, I gave away the cake to him. I walked on a little in all the pride of an Evangelical peacock, when of a sudden my old aunt's kindness crossed me; the sum it was to her; the pleasure she had a right to expect that I, not the old impostor, should take in eating her cake; the cursed ingratitude by which, under the color of a Christian virtue, I had frustrated her cherished purpose. I sobbed, wept, and took it to heart so grievously, that I think I never suffered the like, and I was right. It was a piece of unfeeling hypocrisy, and proved a lesson to me ever after. The cake has long been masticated, consigned to dunghill with the ashes of that unseasonable pauper.

"But when Providence, who is better to us all than our aunts, gives me a pig, remembering my temptation and my fall, I shall endeavour to act towards it more in the spirit of the donor's purpose.

"Yours (short of pig) to command in every thing." — Vol. 11. pp. 70-73.

Among Lamb's most valued friends was Bernard Barton, the Quaker Poet. The following singular letter, was addressed to that gentleman, on the fate of Fauntleroy.

"And now, my dear Sir, trifling apart, the gloomy catastrophe of yesterday morning prompts a sadder vein. The fate of the unfortunate Fauntleroy makes me, whether I will or no, to cast reflecting eyes around on such of my friends as, by a parity of situation, are exposed to a similarity of temptation. My very style seems to myself to become more impressive than usual, with the charge of them. Who that standeth, knoweth but he may yet fall? Your hands as yet, I am most willing to believe, have never deviated into other's property. You think it impossible that you could ever commit so heinous an offence; but so thought Fauntleroy once; so have thought many besides him, who at last have expiated as he hath done. You are as yet upright; but you are a banker, or at least the next thing to it. I feel the delicacy of the subject; but cash must pass through your hands, sometimes to a great amount. If in an unguarded hour but I will hope better. Consider the scandal it will bring upon those of your persuasion. Thousands would go to see a Quaker hanged, that would be indifferent to the fate of a Presbyterian or an Anabaptist. Think of the effect it would have on the sale of your poems alone, not to mention higher considerations! I tremble, I am sure, at myself, when I think that so many poor victims of the law, at one time of their

life, made as sure of never being hanged, as I, in my own presumption, am ready, too ready, to do myself. What are we better than they? Do we come into the world with different necks? Is there any distinctive mark under our left ears? Are we unstrangulable, I ask you? Think on these things. I am shocked sometimes at the shape of my own fingers, not for their resemblance to the ape tribe (which is something), but for the exquisite adaptation of them to the purposes of picking, fingering, &c." Vol. 1. pp. 168, 169.

A letter to Mr. Gilman, a common friend of Coleridge and himself, contains a well-merited and amusing hit at the would-be philosopher's vagaries.

"I was over St. Luke's the other day with my friend Tuthill, and mightily pleased with one of his contrivances for the comfort and amelioration of the students. They have double cells, in which a pair may lie feet to feet horizontally, and chat the time away as rationally as they can. It must certainly be more sociable for them these warm, raving nights. The right-hand truckle in one of these friendly recesses, at present vacant, was preparing, I understood, for Mr. Irving. Poor fellow! it is time he removed from Pentonville. I followed him as far as to Highbury the other day, with a mob at his heels, calling out upon Ermigiddon, who I suppose is some Scotch moderator. He squinted out his favorite eye last Friday, in the fury of possession, upon a poor woman's shoulders that was crying matches, and has not missed it. The companion truck, as far as I could measure it with my eye, would conveniently fit a person about the length of Coleridge, allowing for a reasonable drawing up of the feet, not at all painful. Does he talk of moving this quarter? You and I have too much sense to trouble ourselves with revelations; marry, to the same in Greek, you may have something professionally to say. Tell C. that he was to come and see us some fine day. Let it be before he moves, for in his new quarters he will necessarily be confined in his conversation to his brother prophet. Conceive the two Rabbis foot to foot, for there are no Gamaliels there to affect a humbler posture! All are masters in that Patmos, where the law is perfect equality; Latmos, I should rather say, for they will be Luna's twin darlings; her affection will be ever at the full. Well; keep your brains moist with gooseberry this mad March, for the devil of exposition seeketh dry places."— Vol. 11. pp. 267 – 269.

One passage more, and we have done. of Elia, as well as our last extract.

It

It is the last Essay

was written in ac

knowledgment of a present of game from some unknown

admirer.

"We love to have our friend in the country sitting thus at our table by proxy; to apprehend his presence (though a hundred miles may be between us) by a turkey, whose goodly aspect reflects to us his 'plump corpusculum'; to taste him in grouse or woodcock; to feel him gliding down in the toast peculiar to the latter; to concorporate him in a slice of Canterbury brawn. This is indeed to have him within ourselves; to know him intimately; such participation is methinks unitive, as the old theologians phrase it."

Elia presents his acknowledgments to his Correspondent unknown,' for a basket of prodigiously fine game. He takes for granted that so amiable a character must be a reader of the Athenæum, else he had meditated a notice in The Times.' Now if this friend had consulted the Delphic oracle for a present suited to the palate of Elia, he could not have hit upon a morsel so acceptable. The birds he is barely thankful for; pheasants are poor fowls disguised in fine feathers. But a hare roasted hard and brown, with gravy and melted butter! — old Mr. Chambers, the sensible clergyman in Warwickshire, whose son's acquaintance has made many hours happy in the life of Elia, used to allow a pound of Epping to every hare. Perhaps that was over-doing it. But, in spite of the note of Philomel, who, like some fine poets, that think no scorn to adopt plagiarisms from a humble brother, reiterates every spring her cuckoo cry of Jug, Jug, Jug,' Elia pronounces that a hare, to be truly palated, must be roasted. Jugging sophisticates her. In our way it eats so crips,' as Mrs. Minikin says. Time was, when Elia was not arrived at his taste, that he preferred to all luxuries a roasted pig. But he disclaims all such green-sickness appetites in future, though he hath to acknowledge the receipt of many a delicacy in that kind from correspondents, - good, but mistaken men, in consequence of their erroneous supposition, that he had carried up into mature life the prepossessions of childhood. From the worthy Vicar of Enfield he acknowledges a tithe contribution of extraordinary sapor. The ancients must have loved hares. Else why adopt the word lepores (obviously from lepus) but for some subtile analogy between the delicate flavor of the latter, and the finer relishes of wit in what we most poorly translate pleasantries. The fine madnesses of the poet are the very decoction of his diet. Thence is he harebrained. Harum-scarum is a libellous unfounded phrase, of modern usage. 'T is true the hare is the most circumspect of

animals, sleeping with her eye open. Her ears, ever erect, keep them in that wholesome exercise, which conduces them to form the very tit-bit of the admirers of this noble animal. Noble will I call her, in spite of her detractors, who, from occasional demonstrations of the principle of self-preservation (common to all animals), infer in her a defect of heroism. Half a hundred horsemen, with thrice the number of dogs, scour the country in pursuit of puss across three counties; and because the wellflavored beast, weighing the odds, is willing to evade the hue and cry, with her delicate ears shrinking perchance from discord, comes the grave naturalist, Linnæus perchance, or Buffon, and gravely sets down the hare as a timid animal. Why Achilles, or Bully Dawson, would have declined the preposterous combat.

"In fact, how light of digestion we feel after a hare! How tender its processes after swallowing! What chyle it promotes! How etherial! as if its living celerity were a type of its nimble coursing through the animal juices. The notice might be longer. It is intended less as a Natural History of the Hare, than a cursory thanks to the country good Unknown.' The hare has many friends, but none sincerer than

"ELIA."

Vol. 11. pp. 306 - 309.

There is one part of Lamb's private life, which Mr. Talfourd glosses over more indulgently than most of his readers will approve. The intemperate use of intoxicating liquors has been often laid to his charge, and the charge seems fully proved; but Mr. Talfourd hides the vice under such gentle names as "genial frailty," a tenderness which neither respect for the memory of the dead, nor the natural partiality of a friendly biographer, can wholly excuse. It would have been

enough to state the fact, and leave the readers to think of it as they might. He was not bound harshly to cond. mn; but it would have been in better taste to abstain from all attempt at palliation.

ART. IV.A Course of Legal Study, addressed to Students and the Profession generally. By DAVID HOFFMAN, Jur. utr. Doct. Göttingen. Second Edition, rewritten and much enlarged. In Two Volumes. Baltimore; Published by Joseph Neal. 1836. 8vo.

pp. 876.

A NOTICE of the first edition of this work appeared in the sixteenth number of our journal; but in the interval of nineteen years, which separates the first from the second edition, the field of legal bibliography has been so much enlarged, that the present edition has a fair claim to be considered rather a new work than the extension and enlargement of an old one. During that period, the science of the law has, in England, been illustrated by the labors of the Chittys, father and sons, Sugden, Preston, Theobald, Phillips, Starkie, Amos, Shelford, Collyer, and Stephen, whose treatise on Pleading is, perhaps, the most beautiful and philosophical work on any legal subject, which has appeared in England, since the days of Blackstone. Our own country too, which, twenty years ago, had done little more than adapt a few English text-books to our meridian, with just enough of editorial matter to make a decent apology for a copyright, has since vied with the mother country in the number and value of its works on legal subjects. In proof of this, we need only mention (among others) the learned treatises of Mr. Willard Phillips on Insurance and on Patents, and of Judge Gould on Pleading, Mr. Laussat's Essay on Equity in Pennsylvania, which the London Law Magazine pronounces "an admirable book for any man, a wonderful book for a student to write," the treatises of Mr. Stearns and Judge Jackson on Real Law, the various legal publications of Mr. Angell, Mr. Cushing's Essay on the Trustee Process in Massachusetts, which, though an unpretending little work, on a subject of local and limited interest, deserves honorable mention as a model of neatness, accuracy, and philosophical disposition of parts, Dunlap's Treatise on Admiralty Practice, (in which, by the by, the editorial labors of Mr. Sumner constitute much the most valuable portion,) and, above all, the Commentaries of Chancellor Kent on American law in general, and of Mr. Justice Story on Bailments, Constitutional Law, the Conflict of Laws, and Equity Jurisprudence, all of