"Deaths overset one, and put one out long after the recent grief. Two or three have died within this last two twelvemonths, and so many parts of me have been numbed. One sees a picture, reads an anecdote, starts a casual fancy, and thinks to tell of it to this person in preference to every other: the person is gone whom it would have peculiarly suited. It won't do for another. Every departure destroys a class of sympathies. There's Capt. Burney gone! What fun has whist now?--what matters it what you lead, if you can not fancy him looking over you? One never hears any thing, but the image of the particular person occurs with whom alone almost you would care to share the intelligence: thus one distributes oneself about--and now for so many parts of me I have lost the market. Common natures do not suffice me. Good people, as they are called, won't serve. I want individuals. I am made up of queer points, and I want so many answering needles. The going away of friend does not make the remainder more precious. It takes so much from them as there was a common link. A. B. and C. make a party. A. dies. B. not only loses A., but all A.'s part in C. C. loses A.'s part in B., and so the alphabet sickens by subtraction of interchangeables." But gentle-spirited as he was, Lamb knew how to use the polished weapon of satire. Witness his 'Letter to Southey,' and the following keen sonnet upon the editor of the Quarterly Review. It is a revenge for the severely-expressed 'distaste of a small though acute mind, for an original power which it could not appreciate, and which disturbed the conventional associations of which it was master.' GIFFORD was originally a shoe-maker. The sonnet is entitled, 'SAINT CRISPIN to Mr. GIFFORD,' and dated 'Saint Crispin's Eve': "All unadvised, and in an evil hour, Lured by aspiring thoughts, my son, you daft The lowly labors of the 'Gentle Craft' For learned toils, which blood and spirit sour. All things, dear pledge, are not in all men's power; The wiser sort of shrub affects the ground: And sweet content of mind is oftener found In cobbler's parlor, than in critic's bower. The sorest work is what doth cross the grain; And better to this hour you had been plying Tho obsequious awl, with well-waxed finger flying, Than ceaseless thus to till a thankless vein: Still teasing muses, which are still denying; Making a stretching-leather of your brain." The annexed ludicrous account of a temporary indisposition, was addressed to Bernard Barton, the well-known Quaker poet. It breathes the very spirit of 'Elia:'