"She left me two days afterwards, and the last I heard of her was in the situation of companion to a Russian Countess, with whom she was an immense favorite. She made some effort to gain possession of these letters; but I reminded her, that, as they had been written exclusively for my benefit, I considered I had a right to keep them. To this she simply answered, 'Very well, Madame.'" * * * * * It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that the story of Lina Dale is told here precisely as related to us by Madame La P----re, of course excepting the necessary changes in the names of places and persons. The three letters are not copies of the original ones in the possession of Madame La P----re, but a close transcript of them from memory,--the substance of them is identical, and in many instances the words also. The extraordinary power shown by Lina Dale in maintaining the character she had assumed and sustained during two years and a half was fully carried out by the skill and cleverness of her pretended correspondence; and in reading over these piles of letters, so full of originality, one could not but feel regret at the perversion of powers so remarkable,--powers which might have been developed by healthy action into means of usefulness and good. CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS. FOURTH PAPER. Lamb's time, after his manumission from India-House, seems to have hung rather heavily upon his hands. Though the "birds of the air" were not so free as he was then, I fear they were a great deal happier and vastly more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years' confinement in a counting-house,--(he entered the office a dark-haired, bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired, rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)--though, when in the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote (and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emancipation from the "Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"