Did the Quigleys and the Hands, I wonder, shed tears over Mr. Southey’s “Account of the Life of Henry Kirke White”? Did they know Francis Boott, of Boston, the young American gentleman who placed, Mr. Southey tells us, a tablet to Henry’s memory in All Saints Church, Cambridge? Were they moved by James Montgomery’s “Prison Amusements; Written during nine months confinement in the Castle of York, in the years of 1795 and 1796”? Mr. Montgomery tells us in the prefatory advertisement, “they were the transcripts of melancholy feelings--the warm effusions of a bleeding heart.” Did they read “Gertrude of Wyoming,” “Theodric; a Domestic Tale,” and the “Pleasures of Hope”? Did they read the memoirs prefaced to the various selections? If so, I hope they found them as delightful as I do. There is the inexhaustibly fascinating “Memoirs of Charles Lamb,” in which the anonymous critic improves the occasion by reproving sternly the Lake Poets, or the “Lakers,” as he calls them. “The thousand Songs,” he tells us, “of our writers in verse of past time dwell on all tongues, with the melodies of Moore. But who learns or repeats the cumbrous verses of Wordsworth, which require an initiation from their writer to comprehend?” Later this gentleman has occasion to refer to “Another School of Poetry,” which “arose in opposition to that of the Lakers.” “Their talents,” he writes, “are before the world. To this new school belonged the late poet Shelley, whose lofty powers are unquestionable; Keats, also now deceased; and Leigh Hunt.” Keats, also now deceased! What porridge fed the writer of this memoir? Well, my concern is not with the poor hack who edited this book and wrote the memoirs. I hope Messrs. Grigg and Elliot paid him well. And as for Charlie and Esther and Jenny and the robins in the locust tree--well, Charlie Quigley’s dust and his good sword’s rust, and his soul is with the saints, I trust. I hope Esther married him. I’m glad he brought her “The Poetical Works of Rogers, Campbell, J. Montgomery, Lamb and Kirke White,” even if Jenny was disappointed. For if she’d made her drawings on the cover of a candy box they would not now be in my library. THE INEFFICIENT LIBRARY