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 LAMB 121 pointment in the accountant's office of the East India company, which he held until his retirement with a pension in 1825. To meet- ings with Coleridge on his visits to London, when they used to sup together at an inn, and sit in conversation nearly through the night, he attributed the first quickening of his intellect to literary activity; saying in a letter to him : " You first kindled in me, if not the power, yet the love of poetry, and beauty, and kindli- ness." There was a tendency to insanity in his family. He himself at the age of 20 was confined six weeks in a madhouse. He was not again affected, but the tendency was more strongly marked in his sister Mary. On Sept. 22, 1796, she killed her mother in a paroxysm of madness, and from this time she was subject to attacks of insanity. She always had pre- monition of them, and would indicate the mo- ment when her brother should take her to the asylum. He devoted himself only to her, and admitted no connection which could interfere with his single care to sustain and comfort her. His first compositions were in verse, written slowly and at long intervals. His earliest printed poems are contained in a vol- ume published conjointly with Coleridge and Charles Lloyd in 1797, and republished only in conjunction with Lloyd in 1798. In that year he produced also his prose tale of " Rosamund Gray," was associated with Coleridge and Southey in preparing a volume of fugitive po- etry under the title of the " Annual Anthol- ogy," and was engaged in writing the tragedy of "John Woodvil," which was rejected by the managers, but was published in 1801. He made one other dramatic attempt, " Mr. H.," a pleasant farce, which was produced at Drury Lane theatre in 1806, with Mr. Elliston in the principal character. It was damned on the first night, and Lamb, who sat with his sister in the front of the pit, gave way to the com- mon feeling, hissed and hooted as loudly as any one, and henceforth made a jest of the wreck of his dramatic hopes. He had already begun his studies of the old English authors, whom he always preferred to later writers with one or two exceptions, and published in 1808 his " Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the Time of Shakespeare," with appreciative and suggestive notes, which was more favorably received than his pre- ceding works. To the " Reflector," a short- lived quarterly magazine edited by Leigh Hunt in 1810, he contributed some of his finest pieces, as the essay " On Garrick and Acting," which contains his character of Lear, the "Es- says on Hogarth," and the " Farewell to To- bacco." His celebrity as an author and the circle of his literary friends had greatly in- creased when the establishment of the " London Magazine" in 1820 occasioned the composi- tions by which he acquired his most brilliant reputation, the "Essays of Elia," first collected in 1823, to which the " Last Essays of Elia " were added in 1833. In 1825 occurred one of the principal events of his uneventful life, his retirement from his clerkship, which is de- scribed in his essay " The Superannuated Man." His salary had then become 700 a year, and he was allowed a life annuity of 450. Great consideration had uniformly been shown him by his superiors. So highly did he value the independence thus obtained by drudgery, that he advised one of his friends rather to seek five consolatory minutes between the desk and the bed, or even to throw himself " from the steep Tarpeian rock, slapdash, headlong upon iron spikes," than to rely solely upon literary labor for support. His exultation on his release ap- pears in his letters: "I came home for ever on Tuesday in last week. The incomprehen- sibleness of my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity." Coleridge, Lloyd, Southey, Godwin, Manning, Wordsworth, George Dyer, Hazlitt, Talfourd, Bernard Barton, Leigh Hunt, Gary, Procter, De Quincey, and Hood were among those who shared his intimacy. Many of these were wont to meet at the Wednesday evening parties of Charles and Mary Lamb in his chambers in Inner Temple lane, which would occupy a large space in a literary history of his epoch, and which his biographer elaborately compares with the evenings of Holland house. Lamb presided over the motley group, stammering out puns, witticisms, and fine remarks, while his countenance is described as presenting a sort of quivering sweetness, "deep thought striving with humor, the lines of suffering wreathed into cordial mirth;" and his whole appearance resembled his own characterization of another person, " a compound of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel." Though many of his curious sayings have been recorded, it is affirmed that they give no idea of the singular traits, the verbal felicities, and happy thoughts of his conversation. His single frailty was the eagerness with which from an early period of life he would quaff exciting liquors, snatch- ing a fearful pleasure "between the acts of his distressful drama." He made a final aban- donment of tobacco, though he had learned to smoke the strongest preparations of the weed, saying to Dr. Parr that he had toiled after this power as some men toil after virtue. His large intellectual tolerance, cherishing among his intimate associates men of every variety of philosophical, religious, and political opinions, has rarely been equalled. He de- lighted especially in individual peculiarities and oddities, and in all striking displays of human nature. During the last six years of his life he resided with his sister successively at Is- lington, Enfield, and Edmonton, often visiting his old associates in London, heavily afflicted by the deaths of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and with little disposition to write anything but verses and essays that were given to his friends. While taking his daily morning walk he ac- cidentally fell, slightly wounding his face, and erysipelas ensued, which terminated fatally.