1896,] The Biography of a Humorist who lived cozily in bachelor's quarters and deplored the sad con dition of family affairs. Mary's sudden dementia had been brought on by overwork, and Charles, for eight years, had been the mainstay of the family. Cutting loose, now, from all entang ling relations, the younger man gave himself absolutely to his sacred service of love. When Mary was sane the two lived together "in a sort of double singleness;" when she was out of her mind, which was not rarely, he would plod faithfully on at his desk in the South Sea House, patiently awaiting her return to their home. This life service was a glad return for " obligations extending be yond memory;" for Mary being ten years his senior had been to him a second mother. Yet Mary had not been the only friend of his boyhood He says "I have had playmates, I have had companions, In my days of childhood, in my joyful school days." We know from frequent allusions in his essays how tenderly he regarded those joyful school days. His early home had been in the Temple, a group of buildings given over to the lawyers. "Its church, its hall, its gardens, its fountains," its old sun-dial, and its solid quaint old buildings, all these were his " oldest recollec tions.", But he left these haunts when but eight years old to be a blue-coat boy at Christ's Hospital. To wear the long-tailed coat and yellow stockings, to run bare-headed about the London streets in all weathers, to eat in the commons and sleep 'in the dormitories of that famous school has been the happy lot of sac •cessive generations of English lads. But since the time when the pious boy king, Edward, founded the institution no stronger friendship has ever been formed than that between our shrinking, stammering, girlish-looking hero and a sturdy country boy, one, of the wonders of the school for learning. In after years Lamb exclaimed: " Come back into memory like as thou wert in the dayspring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Logician, Metophysician, Bard 1 How have I seen the casual passer through the cloisters stand still, entranced with admira tion to hear thee unfold in thy deep; sweet intonations the mys teries of jamblichus or Plotinus, .' 1 " 1 "I' or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar—while the old Gray )liars reechoed to the accents of the ins . pired charily boy "
Significant historical Pennsylvania newspapers