Again, in December, 1824:—­“Taylor & Hessey finding their magazine goes off very heavily at 2s. 6d., are prudently going to raise their price another shilling; and having already more authors than they want, intend to increase the number of them.  If they set up against the New Monthly, they must change their present hands.  It is not tying the dead carcase of a Review to a half-dead Magazine will do their business.”

In January, 1825 (to Sarah Hutchinson):—­“You ask about the editor of the Lond.  I know of none.  This first specimen [of a new series] is flat and pert enough to justify subscribers, who grudge at t’other shilling.”

Next month Lamb writes, again to Barton:—­“Our second Number [of the new series] is all trash.  What are T. & H. about?  It is whip syllabub, ‘thin sown with aught of profit or delight’.  Thin sown! not a germ of fruit or corn.  Why did poor Scott die!  There was comfort in writing with such associates as were his little band of scribblers, some gone away, some affronted away, and I am left as the solitary widow [in one of Barton’s poems] looking for watercresses.”

Finally, in August, 1825:—­“Taylor has dropt the ‘London’.  It was indeed a dead weight.  It was Job in the Slough of Despond.  I shuffle off my part of the pack, and stand like Christian with light and merry shoulders.”

In addition to Lamb and Hazlitt the London Magazine had more or less regular contributions, in its best days, from De Quincey, Allan Cunningham (Nalla), T.G.  Wainewright, afterwards the poisoner, but in those days an amusing weaver of gay artificial prose, John Clare, Bernard Barton, H.F.  Cary, Richard Ayton, George Darley, Thomas Hood, John Hamilton Reynolds, Sir John Bowring, John Poole, B.W.  Procter; while among occasional writers for it were Thomas Carlyle, Landor and Julius Hare.

The essay, “Stage Illusion,” in the number for August, 1825, was, I believe, the last that Lamb contributed. (In this connection see Mr. Bertram Dobell’s Sidelights on Charles Lamb, 1903.) Lamb then passed over to Colburn’s New Monthly Magazine, where the “Popular Fallacies” appeared, together with certain other of his later essays.  His last contribution to that magazine was dated September, 1826.  In 1827 he was chiefly occupied in selecting Garrick play extracts for Hone’s Table Book, at the British Museum, and for a while after that he seems to have been more interested in writing acrostics and album verses than prose.  In 1831, however, Moxon’s Englishman’s Magazine offered harbourage for anything Lamb cared to give it, and a brief revival of Elia (under the name of Peter) resulted.  With its death in October, 1831, Lamb’s writing career practically ceased.

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Page 1.  THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE.

London Magazine, August, 1820.