On this subject Mr Talfourd makes the following excellent remark:--"The wonder is, that, amidst all the difficulties, the sorrows, and the excitements of his succeeding forty years, the malady never recurred. Perhaps the true cause of this remarkable exemption--an exemption the more remarkable when his afflictions are considered in association with one single frailty--will be found in the sudden claim made on his moral and intellectual nature by a terrible exigency, and by his generous answer to that claim; _so that a life of self-sacrifice was rewarded by the preservation of unclouded reason_." We will not weaken so admirable a remark by repeating it in a worse phraseology of our own. We wish the Serjeant always wrote in the same clear, forcible, and unaffected manner. With respect to this seizure which Lamb, in an early part of his life, had experienced, there is a reference in one of his letters too curious to pass unnoticed. Writing to Coleridge, he says--"At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as my memory will permit, of the strange turns my frenzy took. I look back upon it at times with a gloomy kind of envy, for, while it lasted, I had many, many hours of pure happiness. Dream not, Coleridge, of having tasted all the grandeur and wildness of fancy till you have gone mad! All now seems to me vapid, or comparatively so." The residue of Lamb's life is uneventful. The publication of a book--a journey into Cumberland--his final liberation from office, are the chief incidents. These it is not necessary to arrange in chronological order: they can be alluded to as occasion requires. But we will pursue a little further our notice of Mr Talfourd's biographical labours, that we may clear our way as we proceed.