brought before us in biographies, essays, letters, etc., than Charles
Lamb. His stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs,--"almost immaterial
legs," Hood called them,--his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head
"worthy of Aristotle," his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and,
alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he
owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and
relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to
us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at
No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the
rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated
Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which
posterity peeps in upon the company,--Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry
Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade,
dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny
Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and
Wordsworth,--and sees them discharging the severer offices of the
whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds
over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and
the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the
evening,--"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the
foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably
presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women,"
Mary Lamb.

The _terati_ Talfourd's day were clearly hardier of digestion than
their descendants are. Roast lamb, boiled beef, "heaps of smoking
roasted potatoes," pots of porter,--a noontide meal for a hodman,--and
the hour midnight! One is reminded, _à propos_ of Miss Lamb's robust
viands, that Elia somewhere confesses to "an occasional nightmare;" "but