will do much to diminish the scourge of mosquitoes. All pots and pans containing water should be regularly turned out once a week, and puddles should be brushed out. The larva takes

some seven days to develope, so that once a week suffices to destroy each brood. All useless water should be drained away and stagnant ponds filled up. The introduction of fish has markedly diminished the number of mosquitoes around Mr. Hanbury's celebrated garden at La Mortela on the Riviera. They eagerly devour the larvae, and should be made use of in all large areas of water. For smaller areas some culicicide should be tried, and more experiments in this direction are urgently needed. One of the simplest remedies known is kerosene oil. A piece of rag tied to a stick should be dipped into the oil, and then applied to the surface of the water. The oil diffuses in a fine film over the surface and clogs the breathing tubes of the larval insect; it possibly interferes with the action of the surface tension; at any rate the larvae die. Fresh tar has the same effect. This painting' of the water must be renewed once a week. Wells and cisterns should be kept closed. A more careful selection of the site for houses and a more liberal use of wire-netting mosquito shutters will do much to minimise the risk to Europeans in malarious districts.

The various remedies suggested above have been tried with success in different parts of the world. The writer has been assured by an old inhabitant of Colombo that the mosquitoes have distinctly diminished in number in parts of that town since the custom of storing water near the houses was abandoned. During this summer the authorities at Sassari in Sardinia claim to have practically exterminated the mosquitoes. . by killing the larvae in the swamps with petroleum, and the flies with chlorine and other destructive chemicals.'

The extinction of malaria in England is a kind of by-product of the draining operations which restored to the agriculturist large tracts of land in the fen districts and elsewhere. The breeding-places of the mosquitoes were dried up and their numbers materially lessened; at the same time the parasite was killed in an increasing number of patients. Thus the mosquitoes which survived had fewer opportunities of infecting themselves, and as time went on the parasite was ultimately eliminated. Anopheles, though in diminished numbers, is still with us, and is especially to be found in those parts of England once infested with the malaria; but the parasite has disappeared. What has been done in England can be attempted elsewhere.

ART. II.-CHARLES LAMB.

The Life and Works of Charles Lamb.

Edited by Alfred

Ainger. Twelve vols. London: Macmillan, 1900.

It is to die ranty attached to any general history of the progress of literature. Eminent as he is, and deeply beloved, his name is often mentioned casually, and as if in a sort of appendix, while contemporaries of his, by no means more eminent, and certainly less lovable, obtain comparatively lengthy examination. This is caused, without doubt, by several conditions. In the first place, with all his charm and power, Lamb was, properly speaking, not a professional writer. By the side of Hazlitt, of Leigh Hunt, of De Quincey, he is an amateur. He did not give his life, or even his leisure, but only his odd moments and occasional moods to the business of writing. By means of very handsome type, thick paper, few words on a page, by means also of including much that Mary Lamb wrote and not Charles, by means of four volumes of familiar correspondence and one of biography, his latest publishers have contrived to extend the Works of Charles Lamb' to a dozen tomes; he remains, for all their piety, an occasional writer.

T is to be remarked that the writings of Charles Lamb are

Nor, in the second place, does Charles Lamb shine preeminently in his elaborate and ambitious undertakings. We are disappointed to find a certain intensity, which marked his letters and doubtless his conversation, lacking to his dramas, his poems, and his fiction. We are rewarded by it in his essays, which he cast from him in nonchalance, and in his scattered and brief critical dicta. But it is plain that in a historical survey, where volume counts for much, it is not easy to bring so exiguous a writer into competition with his copious friends, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Godwin, and Southey. Cerebral activity was restricted and intermittent with Charles Lamb; it is an injustice even to make him stand in line with those who could pour forth their thoughts and images in a never-failing stream. As Canon Ainger, the tenderest of his judges, has remarked, there is no difficulty in detecting the limitations of Lamb.' That is indeed so easy as to be hardly worth doing at all, and the accomplishment of the trumpery task has usually led to such ignominy as must, to the end of time, follow the peculiar efforts of Carlyle in this direction. It seems to be decreed that the critic who fails to appreciate Lamb shall, in so failing, lay himself open to derision. And it is decreed, too, that the

comparative historian of literature shall find no figure more difficult than Elia to fit into his general plan or puzzle-picture.

We find the nature of Charles Lamb, then, excessively individualised. But this very quality, if it embarrasses the historian, greatly attracts the biographer. In consequence, Lamb, with his clusters of personal details, his vivid unlikeness to all other people, his bounded and restrained character, whose current runs so deep and fast where it runs at all, has been singularly dear to the student of individual physiognomy. Ever since he died, those who have thought they knew and understood him have endeavoured to tell us what manner of man he was. From the first it was comprehended that he belongs to the exceptions, not to the rules, that he would evade the conventional biographical treatment altogether. The portrait of his soul is a labour fitted for a Japanese artist, who will be haunted by no rhetorical tradition, but will patiently add detail to detail till the whole is known. The life of Charles Lamb, the critical study of his work, must not be painted in the grand style.' It asks for strenuous labour in the arrangement of a congeries of individual traits and touches. His early biographers were not aware of this. They concealed and they adapted the truth about him. Gradually those weaknesses which they thought it pious to ignore have evaded their discretion. We now know the worst about Charles Lamb, and the severest judgment we can pronounce on his foibles is that they marvellously heighten the picture of his character. We see him now, it is probable, as distinctly as we shall ever see him, and we recognise in him a figure for the pen of Aubrey or the pencil of Holbein. He has found a biographer and editor exactly fitted for him in the Master of the Temple, who has now devoted twenty years to the happy labour of elucidating Charles Lamb.

There is a peculiar interest in studying the development of those minds which first, and with the mightiest throes, labour under the bondage of a time-worn tradition. We follow the intellectual and imaginative emancipation of a Marlowe or a Bürger or an Alfred de Vigny with even keener curiosity than we give to greater men who do not struggle against such local difficulties. Charles Lamb is not, of course, to be mentioned among innovators of this order. There is no incident in his career which parallels the walks and talks of his more inspired friends over the uplands above Alfoxden. Yet Lamb, too, and in a degree which has been insufficiently observed, was a pioneer in the romantic revival. In his early letters, as we now possess them, we are startled by contemporary

references to poets whom we are accustomed to think of as belonging to an earlier age. To the indifferent Coleridge, wholly occupied with the future, Lamb appeals for sympathy with what Burns is doing in Scotland and Cowper in Norfolk. His friends can hardly be said to have broken with the eighteenth century, for they were never chained to it. Lamb, on the other hand, with a greater mental docility, accepts all the partial ameliorations of the end of the old age, and is only gradually dragged on into the full light of romance.

It was circumstance, indeed, and not temperament which made Charles Lamb anything of an innovator. His early letters display him to us as almost painfully handicapped by a humility of judgment which his vivacity of fancy and a growing energy of thought gradually belied. He became confident and self-reliant, but he never ceased to be humble. It is a trait which adds to the beauty of his character and to our sympathy with it, but it is none the less pathetic. To the very last Lamb was timid, casily silenced, daunted by position and wealth and animal spirits superior to his own. If he nerves himself to write a letter to Sir Walter Scott, it is with the determination to be very respectful.' That any one should think it an honour to be addressed by Charles Lamb is a contingency which never crosses his mind. He deprecates the wrath of editors, he excuses himself to correspondents, he trembles at fifty before a board of indulgent and appreciative Directors. This was not an attitude common among his friends. Wordsworth was not timid, nor Coleridge unwilling to believe his conversation of advantage to the listener; if Southey could have been a little less cock-sure' than he was, it might have added a charm to his exuberant rectitude. None of these excellent men were, what Lamb was, humble.

Humility was the natural effect, on so sweet a nature, of the extreme disadvantage of the conditions under which his life began. Nothing could exceed the banality of his surroundings as a child and a young man. He sprang from the upper grades of the lower rather than from the lower grades of the middle class. His father, an excellent, ingenious, and trustworthy man, with many of the qualities of his son Charles, was a sort of clerk or confidential servant. From the child's earliest consciousness he must have seen those around him wrestling for a bare gentility, fearing by any rash act of independence to endanger it, and eclipsing their own wishes and tastes in favour of those of an employer. Here was the weariness of poverty, and none of its freedom. In the struggle to preserve the decencies of life, all its elasticity and all its charm must have been sacrificed.

We see Lamb dimly until his twentieth year. He is revealed to us as precocious, with something of the superficial smartness of the London street-urchin, in spite of a refinement and gentleness which his relatives contrived to preserve. But we find him now, and later on, making no effort of any kind to escape from the narrowness of his circumstances. He rather encouraged it; he strove for nothing better; he probably concluded, in his humbleness, that he was not fitted for anything else. He withdrew from the squalor of his life into literature, and this became his constant habit. It would be interesting to know how he formed this conception of an intellectual existence sustained, as it were underground, between cloister and cloister.' His father, we are told, had 'a fine turn for humorous poetry'; Talfourd gives what strikes us as a rather over-vivid account of Charles's Latin acquirements at Christ's Hospital; it seems that the library of Samuel Salt, with its spacious closet of good old English reading,' may have had on the mind of Charles the awakening effect which we know it had had, several years before, on that of Mary. But of positive information we gain little, until we find the imagination of Lamb kindled at the lamp of Coleridge.

It is solely through the happy circumstance that Coleridge preserved the letters of Lamb that we know anything of the mind of the latter before the summer of 1798. Hardly enough has been said about the biographical value of this correspondence. The Charles Lamb revealed in it has few of the characteristics which we come later on to identify with the figure of Elia. He writes in a tone of almost shrinking modesty, with convoluted phrases of timidity and deprecation. So late as June 1796, he reminds Coleridge how much he depends on his indulgent affection. 'You are the only correspondent, and, I might add, the only friend I have in the world. I go nowhere, and have no acquaintance. Slow of speech and reserved of manners, no one seeks or cares for my society, and I am left alone.' We may judge from this what his desolation was before the solitary light of Coleridge broke upon it. Lamb can scarcely have been said to exist until, in December 1794, in his twenty-first year, he went through the strange awakening to the intellectual life which he described two years later to his unique friend, 'in that nice little smoky room at the Salutation, which is even now continually presenting itself to my recollection, with all its associated train of pipes, tobacco, egg-hot, welsh-rabbit, metaphysics and poetry. This was the scene, and Coleridge's the company, in which Lamb awakened to spiritual consciousness; and the