I cheerfully assented to this invitation, and following my conductor up a flight of crooked and dark steps, we entered into a room, over a brazier's shop. A dull light trembled through the small and narrow apartment where, shrouded in a close volume of tobacco smoke, sat in pensive gentility--the kind--the generous--the infant-hearted Charles Lamb; the man whose elastic genius dwelled among the mouldering ruins of by-gone days, until it became steeped in beauty and expanded with philosophy--the wit--the poet--the lingering halo of the sunshine of antiquity--the phœnix of the mighty past. He was of delicate and attenuated stature, and as fragilely moulded as a winter's flower, with a quick and volatile eye, a mind-worn forehead and a countenance eloquent with thought. Around a small table well covered with glasses and a capacious bowl, were gathered a laughing group, eyeing the battalia of the coming supper. Godwin's heavy form and intellectual face, with the swimming eye of (ες τε σε S. T. C. How quaint was his fancy!) Coleridge, flanked the margin of the mirth-inspiring bowl. Col. R----'s introduction made me at home, and ere my hand had dropped from the friendly grasp of our host, he exclaimed--And you are truly from the land of the _great plant_? You have seen the sole cosmopolite spring from the earth. It is the denizen of the whole world, the tireless friend of the wretched, the bliss of the happy. You need no record of the empire of the red man. He has written his fadeless history on a tobacco leaf.