amount to much. When a case of difficult disposition of money, testamentary or otherwise, came before him, he ordinarily handed it over, with a few instructions, to his man Lovel, who was a quick little fellow, and would dispatch it out of hand by the light of natural understanding, of which he had an uncommon share. It was incredible what repute for talents Salt enjoyed by the mere trick of gravity. He was a shy man; a child might pose him in a minuteindolent and procrastinating to the last degree. Yet men would give him credit for vast application, in spite of himself." It is worth remarking that Salt owned the "spacious closet of good old English reading" into which Lamb and his sister were "tumbled early, by accident or design. without much selection or prohibition," as we are told in the essay, "Mackery End." Moreover, Lamb owed his nomination to the clerkship in the East India House to his father's old employer, who was a director of that concern. And it is certain that another Old Bencher of the Inner Temple, Peter Pierson, was a surety on the bond which Lamb gave as a security for his good behavior during his employment. Later, Pierson's place on the bond was taken by another lawyer, Martin Charles Burney.

Thomas Coventry, also an Old Bencher of the Inner Temple, was one of the governors of Christ's Hospital when Lamb entered that famous school. Lamb must have owed his admission to that school as well as his first employment after leaving it to Coventry. "One day," as the story runs, "Coventry said to Mr. Joseph Paice, 'There is a lad whom I placed some years ago in the Blue Coat School, now on the point of leaving it, and I know not what on earth to do with him.' 'Let him have the run of my counting-house till something better offers,' said Mr. Paice; and accordingly Lamb took his place there, and continued in it till he obtained a clerkship in the South Sea House, of which company Mr. Coventry was governor, and Mr. Paice one of the directors." A recent biographer of Lamb, Mr. E. V. Lucas, suggests that likely Samuel Salt, instead of Coventry, stood

sponsor for Lamb at Christ's Hospital, but, aside from the variation in this slight detail, the foregoing account of Coventry's active interest in young Lamb is doubtless true.

Lamb has given us an interesting picture of Coventry in his gallery of the Old Benchers: "Thomas Coventry was a cadet of the noble family of that name. He passed his youth in contracted circumstances, which gave him early those parsimonious habits which in after life never forsook him; so that with one windfall or another, about the time I knew him, he was a master of four or five hundred thousand pounds; nor did he look or walk worth a moidore less. ... His house had the aspect of a strong box... . Coventry gave away thirty thousand pounds at once in his lifetime to a blind charity. His housekeeping was severely looked after, but he kept the table of a gentleman."

Surrounded as he was with all these "old familiar faces,' is it any wonder that Lamb's heart warmed towards the lawyers, and that in the maturity of his genius he achieved "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," which critics have joined in declaring one of the finest English essays of the nineteenth century. Percy Fitzgerald pronounces it, "one of the most exquisite of all the essays of Elia." Hazlitt, in the course of a very friendly appreciation published in "The Spirit of the Age," says: "With what gusto Lamb describes the inns and courts of law, the Temple and Gray's Inn, as if he had been a student there for the last two hundred years, and had been as well acquainted with the person of Sir Francis Bacon as he is with his portrait or writings. Alfred Ainger is even warmer in his praise, declaring "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" to be "one of the most varied and beautiful pieces of prose that English literature can boast." But whatever the general estimate of the critics may be, or what verdict another century may give, it is certain that the lawyers can point to nothing so far written about their profession that is "more varied and beautiful" than Charles Lamb's "Old Benchers of the Inner Temple."

There was one lawyer of the Temple, not mentioned among the Old Benchers, to whom Lamb payed in many ways the glad tribute of his friendship. This was Randal Norris, for many years Sub-Treasurer and Librarian of the Inner Temple. Norris became an attorney's clerk at fourteen years of age, and thereafter resided for more than half a century in the Temple. The librarian of the Inner Temple must have been bothered on more than one occasion by young Lamb, for the latter recounts in later life with his usual humor how Norris handed out to him a black-lettered Chaucer with the remark: "Charlie, I don't know what you find in these very old books, but I observe there is a deal of very indifferent spelling in them." The relations between the Norrises and the Lambs were very close, and on the occasion of the death of his mother, we find Lamb writing Coleridge to the effect that Norris had been more than a father to him and Mrs. Norris more than a mother. Norris died in the Temple January, 1827, aged seventysix. A few days later Lamb wrote of Randal Norris to Henry Crabb Robinson, one of the lawyer friends of his maturer years:

"In him I have a loss the world cannot make up. He was my friend, and my father's friend, for all the life that I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships since. Those are the friendships that outlast a second generation. Old as I am getting, in his eyes I was still the child he knew me. To the last he called me Charlie. I have none to call me Charlie now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple."

Soon after Norris' death, Lamb collaborated with Robinson and Martin Burney, another lawyer friend, in circulating a petition to the Middle Temple Benchers on behalf of Mrs. Norris. The petition was successful and the widow was granted a small annuity.

As the lawyers associated with Lamb's boyhood days were all intimately connected with his home in the Temple and his father's employment there, so the lawyer friends of his manhood are all a part of his famous Thursday

evenings. Once each week with considerable regularity Charles and Mary Lamb kept open house. Under their roof on these occasions was gathered much of the genius and some of the eccentricity of England. Coleridge and Wordsworth came often; more frequently Martin Burney, Talfourd, Basil Montagu, Crabb Robinson and other lawyers. Whist, of which Mary Lamb was an untiring devotee, was generally one of the diversions. Then, of course, there was much talk, enlivened by Lamb's incessant punning. Talfourd in his memoirs of Lamb gives an account of one of the Thursday evenings. Martin Burney was there, of course, and "Basil Montagu, gentle enthusiast in the cause of humanity, which he has lived to see triumphant, is pouring into the outstretched ear of George Dyer some tale of legalized injustice, which the recipient is vainly endeavoring to comprehend."

From this account we gather that Montagu must have been in some measure an unofficial forerunner of the present day bar committee on legal reform. He was not only a reformer of all matters legal, but of the entire human race as well. He numbered among his friends and warm admirers, besides the Lambs, Coleridge, Godwin and Wordsworth. Fanny Kemble, the actress, in her "recollections," has given us an intimate glimpse of Montagu, stating that he had "ability, eccentricity and personal beauty”—a somewhat rare combination in a lawyer! The Recollections continue: “I have a general impression that this personal intercourse gave a far better idea of his intellectual ability than anything he achieved either in his profession or in letters. His conversation was extremely vivid and sparkling, and the quaint eccentricity of his manner added to the impression of originality which he produced upon one." It was Montagu, who in 1813 reprinted an essay of Lamb's, "Confessions of a Drunkard," in a tract entitled "Some Enquiries Into the Effects of Fermented Liquors." Lamb's essay, which had theretofore been quietly slumbering in the files of a defunct magazine, was a rather vivid account of

alleged personal experiences with the drink habit in all its stages. No doubt it was full of Lamb's customary exaggerations, but it now became a part of Montagu's serious propaganda, and Lamb has ever since been held up to the world by temperance reformers as a more or less horrible example.

Baron Field was the judicial element among the lawyers Lamb managed to gather about him. He accompanied the Lambs on their visit to "Mackery End in Herfordshire," which gave rise to the essay bearing that title, wherein Field is referred to as the "friend that was with us." One biographer of Lamb suggests that "considering the intimacy and length of this friendship we hear much less of Field than we would expect." This may have been due to the fact that Field resided for long periods away from London and Lamb's usual haunts. Although Field practiced several years on the Oxford Circuit, he went to New South Wales in 1816 as Judge of the Supreme Court at Sydney. Lamb addressed to him there the letter that afterwards became the Elia essay, "Distant Correspondents." Field resigned in 1824 and returned to England, only to be appointed two years later Chief Justice of Gibraltar. He died at Torquay in 1846. He was a kindly and intelligent man, but his chief distinction is that he achieved the friendship of Charles Lamb.

Perhaps the lawyer seen most frequently at Lamb's Thursday evenings was Martin Burney. Lamb recognized the permanency of Burney as a feature of these functions in a letter written to one of his numerous correspondents: "Like other great men," he said, "I have a public day, cribbage and pipes, with Phillips and noisy Martin Burney." Burney was originally an attorney but soon left that branch of the profession to become a barrister. On November 8, 1809, Mary Lamb wrote Mrs. Hazlitt that Burney had on the previous day been examined by Lord Eldon for admission to the bar. He was not very successful, however, in either branch of the law. At one time he held a