_The noise of the bell and scampering of the boys soon made me realise that Fancy had led me back a hundred years and more, and had given me a glimpse of the boyhood of two famous Englishmen, who have added glory to their ancient school--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, poet and philosopher, and Charles Lamb, essayist and critic, the best beloved of all the good and great men whose writings are dear to us._ _Some day you will read the story of the lives of these two men, and you will love their books,--the weird and fairy poetry of Coleridge, recalling a dreamy youth reared amid the woodlands of Devon--the genial and sweet essays of Lamb, so full of gentle humour, and kindliness, and humanity, so rich in tender thoughts concerning all his fellow-creatures in the great city where he was born and bred, which he loved passionately. To London he had given “his heart and his love in childhood and in boyhood,” and throughout his life his heart was filled with “fulness of joy at the multitudinous scenes of life in the crowded streets of ever dear London.”_ _Charles Lamb’s Essays are among the greatest of our treasures, but even more beautiful than his writings is the record of his noble life--a life of saintly self-sacrifice, cheerfully devoted to the guardianship of a lonely sister, whose girlhood would have been spent in loveless solitude but for her brother’s love. Mary Lamb’s tragic story (too sad to be told here) was illumined by the light of this brotherly love which shone forth when the world was very dark and gloomy._