Puslapio vaizdai
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PULLIC LIBRARY

PNOX

NS

I courted the fair Alice W-n; and, as much as children could understand, I explained to them what coyness, and difficulty, and denial meant to maidens

when suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding, till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech:

"We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been.""

I am quoting, not from the printed text, but from the original manuscript, which is my most cherished literary possession; and this lovely peroration, if such it may be called, is the only part of the essay which has been much interlineated or recast. It appears to have occasioned Lamb considerable difficulty; there was obviously some searching for the right word; a part of it, indeed, was entirely rewritten.

The coyness, the difficulty, and the denial of Alice: was it not immortally written into the record by Lamb himself? Miss Kelly's rejection of an offer of marriage from him must be a figment of the imagination of an old lady, who, as her years approached a century,

had her dream-children, too- children who called Lamb father.

There the matter rested. Fanny Kelly was by way of being forgotten; all the facts of Lamb's life were known, apparently, and he had lain in a curiously neglected grave in Edmonton Churchyard for seventy years. Innumerable sketches and lives and memorials of him, "final" and otherwise, had been written and read. His letters - not complete, perhaps, but volumes of them had been published and read by the constantly increasing number of his admirers, and no one suspected that Lamb had had a serious loveaffair the world accepting without reserve the statement of one of his biographers that "Lamb at the bidding of duty remained single, wedding himself to the sad fortunes of his sister."

Then, quite unexpectedly, in 1903, John Hollingshead, the former manager of the Gaiety Theatre, discovered and published two letters of Charles Lamb written on the same day, July 20, 1819. One, a long letter in Lamb's most serious vein, in which he formally offers his hand, and in a way his sister's, to Miss Kelly, and the other a whimsical, elfish letter, in which he tries to disguise the fact that in her refusal of him he has received a hard blow.

By reason of this important discovery, every line that Lamb had written in regard to Fanny Kelly was read with new interest, and an admirable biography of him by his latest and most sympathetic critic, Edward Verrall Lucas, appearing shortly afterwards,

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