daughter of a pawnbroker, is, against her father’s wishes, wooed by a gentleman, and, thanks to the trick of a maid, goes off with her lover while carrying some valuable jewels with which her father has entrusted her.  There are two other lovers, Pendulous—­who has been unjustly hanged and only reprieved just in time to save his life—­and Marian Flyn, and out of their by-play comes the reconciliation of all.  The feelings of the half-hanged man had earlier been dealt with by Lamb in a letter “On the Inconveniences Resulting from being Hanged,” which he contributed (as “Pensilis”) to “The Reflector” in 1811.

STORIES

After essaying poetry and the drama (for both of which he maintained a lifelong liking, writing in each form during his latest years), the next kind of literary expression on which Lamb ventured was that of stories and verses for children.  In “Rosamund Gray,” which is scarcely a tale for children but rather a classic novelette, he gives the story of a young orphan girl living at Widford in Hertfordshire with her blind grandmother.  The girl is beloved by young Allan Clare, and one evening, wandering in sheer joy over the scenes of past delightful rambles, she is assailed by a villain.  Her blind grandmother finding her gone from the cottage dies of a broken heart, and poor Rosamund, disgraced and terrified, seeks the home of Allan and his sister and there dies.  It is a terrible story told with a beautiful simplicity.  Of how far it may have been founded on fact we do not know, but in Rosamund, Lamb seems to have depicted something of a likeness of the “fair-haired maid” with whom he had been in love, and in Elinor Clare there can be no doubt that he portrayed much of the character of his own loved sister.

The first of Lamb’s known publications professedly for children was “The King and Queen of Hearts:  showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts, and how scurvily the Knave stole them away:  with other particulars pertaining thereto,” and this was only recovered about ten years since after having been forgotten for the best part of a century.  The booklet, which was issued anonymously, consists of a number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half a dozen lines of Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old nursery rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts and their subsequent fate.

The “Tales from Shakspeare,” which followed, were written by both Charles Lamb and his sister:  indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary’s hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was “responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling.”  When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected.