her brother.  When these two were at work on their Tales from Shakespear Martin Burney would sit with them and attempt to write for children too.  Lamb’s letter of May 24, 1830, to Sarah Hazlitt has some amusing stories of his friend, at whom (like George Dyer) he could laugh as well as love.  Lamb speaks of him on one occasion as on the top round of his ladder of friendship.  Writing to Sarah Hazlitt, Lamb says:—­“Martin Burney is as good, and as odd as ever.  We had a dispute about the word ‘heir,’ which I contended was pronounced like ‘air’; he said that might be in common parlance; or that we might so use it, speaking of the ‘Heir at Law,’ a comedy; but that in the law courts it was necessary to give it a full aspiration, and to say hayer; he thought it might even vitiate a cause, if a counsel pronounced it otherwise.  In conclusion, he ’would consult Serjeant Wilde,’ who gave it against him.  Sometimes he falleth into the water; sometimes into the fire.  He came down here, and insisted on reading Virgil’s ‘Eneid’ all through with me (which he did), because a Counsel must know Latin.  Another time he read out all the Gospel of St. John, because Biblical quotations are very emphatic in a Court of Justice.  A third time, he would carve a fowl, which he did very ill-favouredly, because ’we did not know how indispensable it was for a barrister to do all those sort of things well?  Those little things were of more consequence than we supposed.’  So he goes on, harassing about the way to prosperity, and losing it.  With a long head, but somewhat a wrong one——­harum-scarum.  Why does not his guardian angel look to him?  He deserves one:  may be, he has tired him out.”

Martin Burney, of whom another glimpse is caught in the Elia essay “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” died in 1860.  At Mary Lamb’s funeral he was inconsolable.

* * * * *

Page 46.  CHARLES LAMB’S ALBUM VERSES, 1830.

The publication of this volume, in 1830, was due more to Lamb’s kindness of heart than to any desire to come before the world again as a poet.  But Edward Moxon, Lamb’s young friend, was just starting his publishing business, with Samuel Rogers as a financial patron; and Lamb, who had long been his chief literary adviser, could not well refuse the request to help him with a new book. Album Verses became thus the first of the many notable books of poetry which Moxon was to issue between 1830 and 1858, the year of his death.  Among them Tennyson’s Poems, 1833 and 1842; The Princess, 1847; In Memoriam, 1850; Maud, 1855; and Browning’s Sordello, 1840, and Bells and Pomegranates, 1843-1846.

The dedication of Album Verses tells the story of its being:—­

“DEDICATION

“TO THE PUBLISHER

“DEAR MOXON,