To Bernard Barton LXXXV. To Bernard Barton LXXXVI. To Wordsworth LXXXVII. To Bernard Barton LXXXVIII. To Bernard Barton LXXXIX. To Bernard Barton XC. To Southey XCI. To Bernard Barton XCII. To J.B. Dibdin XCIII. To Henry Crabb Robinson XCIV. To Peter George Patmore XCV. To Bernard Barton XCVI. To Thomas Hood XCVII. To P.G. Patmore XCVIII. To Bernard Barton XCIX. To Procter C. To Bernard Barton CI. To Mr. Gilman CII. To Wordsworth CIII. To Mrs. Hazlitt CIV. To George Dyer CV. To Dyer CVI. To Mr. Moxon CVII. To Mr. Moxon INTRODUCTION. No writer, perhaps, since the days of Dr. Johnson has been oftener brought before us in biographies, essays, letters, etc., than Charles Lamb. His stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs,--"almost immaterial legs," Hood called them,--his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head "worthy of Aristotle," his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and, alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated Lamb's "Wednesday Nights." He has kindly left ajar a door through which posterity peeps in upon the company,--Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry Cornwall," Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade, dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S."), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth,--and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics. Elia was no Barmecide host, and the serjeant dwells not without regret upon the solider business of the evening,--"the cold roast lamb or boiled beef, the heaps of smoking roasted potatoes, and the vast jug of porter, often replenished from the foaming pots which the best tap of Fleet Street supplied," hospitably presided over by "the most quiet, sensible, and kind of women," Mary Lamb.