was there a particle of truth in anything you have told me?'
"'No, Madame.'
"This was all I could get from her; but as she left the room, she turned and said, looking at me half reproachfully, half maliciously,—
"'I suppose we had better part now. At any rate, you will at least own that I have interested you, Madame!'
"She left me two days afterwards, and the last I heard of her was in the situation of companion to a Russian Countess, with whom she was an immense favorite. She made some effort to gain possession of these letters; but I reminded her, that, as they had been written exclusively for my benefit, I considered I had a right to keep them. To this she simply answered, 'Very well, Madame.'"
It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to add that the story of Lina Dale is told here precisely as related to us by Madame La P–re, of course excepting the necessary changes in the names of places and persons. The three letters are not copies of the original ones in the possession of Madame La P–re, but a close transcript of them from memory,—the substance of them is identical, and in many instances the words also. The extraordinary power shown by Lina Dale in maintaining the character she had assumed and sustained during two years and a half was fully carried out by the skill and cleverness of her pretended correspondence; and in reading over these piles of letters, so full of originality, one could not but feel regret at the perversion of powers so remarkable,—powers which might have been developed by healthy action into means of usefulness and good.
CHARLES LAMB'S UNCOLLECTED WRITINGS
FOURTH PAPER
Lamb's time, after his manumission from India-House, seems to have hung rather heavily upon his hands. Though the "birds of the air" were not so free as he was then, I fear they were a great deal happier and vastly more contented than our liberated and idle old clerk. Though in the first flush and excitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years' confinement in a counting-house,—(he entered the office a dark-haired, bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired, rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)—though, when in the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote (and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emancipation from the
"Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"
was not fairly over before he felt that man's true element is labor,—that occupation, which in his younger days he had called a "fiend," was in very truth an angel,—the angel of contentment and joy. Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless—as some hope and believe—we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.
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