In 1826 (January) Charles Lamb suffered great grief from the loss of a very old friend, Mr. Norris. It may be remembered that he was one of the two persons who went to comfort Lamb when his mother so suddenly died. Mr. Norris had been one of the officers of the Inner Temple or Christ's Hospital, and had been intimate with the Lambs for many years; and Charles, when young, used always to spend his Christmases with him. "He was my friend and my father's friend," Lamb writes, "all the life I can remember. I seem to have made foolish friendships ever since. Old as I am, in his eyes I was still the child he first knew me. To the last he called me 'Charley.' I have none to call me Charley now. He was the last link that bound me to the Temple." It was after his death that Lamb once more resorted to the British Museum, which he had been in the habit of frequenting formerly, when his first "Dramatic Specimens" were published. Now he went there to make other extracts from the old plays. These were entitled "The Garrick Plays," and were bestowed upon Mr. Hone, who was poor, and were by him published in his "Every Day Book." Subsequently they were collected by Charles himself, and formed a supplement to the earlier "Specimens." Lamb's labors in this task were by no means trivial. "I am now going through a course of reading" (of old plays), he writes; "I have two thousand to go through." Lamb's correspondence with his Quaker friend, Bernard Barton ("the busy B," as Hood called him), whose knowledge of the English drama was confined to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie, went on constantly. His letters to this gentleman comprised a variety of subjects, on most of which Charles offers him good advice. Sometimes they are less personal, as where he tells him that "six hundred have been sold of Hood's book, while Sion's songs do not disperse so quickly;" and where he enters (very ably) into the defects and merits of Martin's pictures, Belshazzar and Joshua, and ventures an opinion as to what Art should and should not be. He is strenuous in advising him not to forsake the Bank (where he is a clerk), and throw himself on what the chance of employ by booksellers would afford. "Throw yourself, rather, from the steep Tarpeian rock, headlong upon the iron spikes. Keep to your bank, and your bank will keep you. Trust not to the Public," he says. Then, referring to his own previous complaints of official toil, he adds, "I retract all my fond complaints. Look on them as lovers' quarrels. I was but half in earnest. Welcome, dead timber of a desk that gives me life. A little grumbling is wholesome for the spleen; but in my inner heart I do approve and embrace this our close but unharassing way of life." Lamb's opinions on books, as well as on conduct, making some deduction for his preference of old writers, is almost always sound. When he is writing to Mr. Walter Wilson, who is editing De Foe, he says of the famous author of "Robinson Crusoe,"--