Our next door.  It’s a relief to know that!  Do you happen to know what Socrates was called?

Mandeville.  I have seen people who knew Lamb very well.  One of them told me, as illustrating his want of dignity, that as he was going home late one night through the nearly empty streets, he was met by a roystering party who were making a night of it from tavern to tavern.  They fell upon Lamb, attracted by his odd figure and hesitating manner, and, hoisting him on their shoulders, carried him off, singing as they went.  Lamb enjoyed the lark, and did not tell them who he was.  When they were tired of lugging him, they lifted him, with much effort and difficulty, to the top of a high wall, and left him there amid the broken bottles, utterly unable to get down.  Lamb remained there philosophically in the enjoyment of his novel adventure, until a passing watchman rescued him from his ridiculous situation.

The fire-tender.  How did the story get out?

Mandeville.  Oh, Lamb told all about it next morning; and when asked afterwards why he did so, he replied that there was no fun in it unless he told it.

SIXTH STUDY

I

The King sat in the winter-house in the ninth month, and there was a fire on the hearth burning before him . . . .  When Jehudi had read three or four leaves he cut it with the penknife.

That seems to be a pleasant and home-like picture from a not very remote period,—­less than twenty-five hundred years ago, and many centuries after the fall of Troy.  And that was not so very long ago, for Thebes, in the splendid streets of which Homer wandered and sang to the kings when Memphis, whose ruins are older than history, was its younger rival, was twelve centuries old when Paris ran away with Helen.

I am sorry that the original—­and you can usually do anything with the “original”—­does not bear me out in saying that it was a pleasant picture.  I should like to believe that Jehoiakiin—­for that was the singular name of the gentleman who sat by his hearthstone—­had just received the Memphis “Palimpsest,” fifteen days in advance of the date of its publication, and that his secretary was reading to him that monthly, and cutting its leaves as he read.  I should like to have seen it in that year when Thales was learning astronomy in Memphis, and Necho was organizing his campaign against Carchemish.  If Jehoiakim took the “Attic Quarterly,” he might have read its comments on the banishment of the Alcmaeonida, and its gibes at Solon for his prohibitory laws, forbidding the sale of unguents, limiting the luxury of dress, and interfering with the sacred rights of mourners to passionately bewail the dead in the Asiatic manner; the same number being enriched with contributions from two rising poets,—­a lyric of love by Sappho, and an ode sent by Anacreon from Teos, with an editorial note explaining that the Maces was not responsible for the sentiments of the poem.