threadbare? and all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home late at night from Baker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how we eyed it for weeks before we made up our minds to the purchase, and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the Saturday night when you set off from Islington fearing you should be too late-and when the old book-seller with some grumbling opened his shop and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures, and when you lugged it home wishing it were twice as cumbersome, and when you presented it to me, and when we were exploring the perfectness of it (collating, you called it), and while I was repairing some of the loose leaves with paste, which your patience would not suffer to be left till day-break-was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat, black clothes which you wear now and are so careful to keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half the honest vanity with which you flaunted it about in that overworn suit for four or five weeks longer than you should have done to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen-or sixteen-shillings, was it? a great affair we thought it then, which you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any nice old purchases now!

In this homely yet felicitous style Bridget pursues her story of the pleasures they formerly wrung out of their poverty, until the essayist finally tells us of his smiles at "the phantom of wealth which her dear imagination had conjured up out of a clear income of a poor-hundred pounds a year." In replying to Bridget, he shrewdly avoids contradicting her by saying, "It is true we were happier when we were poorer, but we were also younger, my cousin." He then suggests to her that their increasing age made competence more desirable, necessary even, than when they were younger and better able to endure the stress and self-denials of poverty. The whole essay is conceived in a delightful spirit. It is doubtless the substance of a real conversation, and though Lamb did not so intend, is pleasantly illustrative of that much-despised apothegm of the Master of wisdom which affirms, that "a man's life consisteth not in the abundance of the things he possesseth."

Taken together, these essays are unique in that they contain that combination of wit with pathos which constitutes true humor, and which, as before stated, is their principal but not their only charm. It is this quality which makes it tolerably certain that they will always have, if not a large circle

of readers, yet, as De Quincey predicted, a select few who, having first learned to admire what, in spite of his faults, was admirable in the man, will read his writings with pleasure, wondering how genius cramped as his was by the hard conditions of his life could have produced such an uncommon series of papers.

It is true that many other men of genius have fought their way to success through obstacles seemingly unsurmountable. But Lamb's environments were exceptionally unfavorable to literary pursuits. His father, though possessing a naturally vigorous mind, was only a barrister's servant. Hence Charles Lamb spent his childhood in circumstances which, but for the affectionate care of Mary, his intelligent sister, could have contributed very little to the awakening of his powers. When seven years old he became a scholar in the school of "Christ's Hospital," where he was handicapped by a peculiarly bashful nature, incurably stammering speech, a shambling gait, and an oddity of manner eminently fitted to make him the butt of his thoughtless school-fellows. Happily, however, his uncommon gentleness won them to treat him with kindness, and also moved his masters to grant him unusual indulgences, and to suffer his sister to watch over him as his ministering angel. Here he remained until he was fifteen, when, being unfitted for the Church because of the defect in his speech, he was compelled by the rules of the institution to quit it with a scarcely halffinished classical education. The needs of his family then made it necessary that he should begin to earn his own living by accepting a clerkship procured for him by his elder brother in the South Sea House. After a brief service in that establishment he secured a better position in the East India House. In his twenty-first year he was smitten with insanity, which was in the family blood, and spent six weeks "in a mad-house." Whether his madness was developed by disappointment in love, or whether it led to the termination of his courtship, is uncertain, albeit it is certain that from about this time he ceased to be the recognized lover of the "mild, fair-haired, blue-eyed" Alice who had held possession of his affections. The dissolution of his hope of taking her to wife wounded him deeply.

Scarcely had he recovered the right use of his reason before

his dear and only sister, Mary, was seized with a fit of madness in which she stabbed and killed her mother! It was in this tragic emergency that Lamb displayed the nobility of his nature. His brother insisted that Mary should be placed permanently in an insane asylum. The city authorities, in view of the violence of her mania, were also disposed to insist that this should be done. But Charles said, No! As a temporary patient it was absolutely necessary to place her in a hospital for treatment. But, though his salary was small, his father dependent upon him, and his selfish brother, John, refused to bear any part of the pecuniary burden, Charles resolutely assumed the care and support of his sister. This purpose required him to abandon all hope of marriage for himself, and the consecration of all his means and energies to Mary's wellbeing. It was a great sacrifice. Yet he made it cheerfully through the remaining thirty-eight years of his life, during which Mary's insane attacks never ceased to recur at brief intervals, though without the violence of the first. This selfforgetful brother provided for her and watched over her with unceasing tenderness. Her affliction was a terrible trial to both. They never left home together for a recreative journey without taking a strait-jacket in their trunk. As her attacks were generally preceded by premonitory symptoms, it was his habit, when they were coming on, to take her by the hand and lead her to an asylum for treatment; and one of their intimate friends speaks of meeting them one day walking hand in hand, weeping as they went, to the abode of mentally diseased persons. It is this fraternal devotion, never excelled by mortal man, which glorifies the character of Charles Lamb, which pleads with his readers not to judge him too severely for his unquestionable faults, but to think of him, if not with complacent, yet with pitiful, affection. Besides being plunged into deepest grief while she was absent from his solitary table, as she was so frequently for weeks together when under treatment, he was ever on the rack of cruel expectation when she was with him of a recurrence of the dreaded symptoms of a fresh attack. Without the least exaggeration, Mr. Talfourd called this "a life-long association as free from every alloy of selfishness, and as remarkable for moral beauty, as this world ever witnessed in brother and sister."

With these facts before him, and with the recollection that for more than thirty years Lamb's days were spent "a prisoner to the desk," which he calls being "chained to a galley thirty years," and that his humble home was much visited evenings by his literary friends and convivial associates, no man can read his essays, and his almost equally interesting letters, without wondering at that virility of genius which achieved so much under circumstances so exceptionally oppressive and disheartening. Neither can one review his sad life, disfigured as it was on one side by failings and faults which no Christian conscience can excuse, and glorified on the other by an unselfish fraternal affection which none but a churl can refuse to regard with unqualified admiration, without being reminded of the rich young Pharisee, of whom, though he refused to pay the price of discipleship, it is said that "Jesus, beholding him, loved him." In like manner, despite his faults, he who beholds Charles Lamb arrayed in the beauty of an unexcelled fraternal affection loves him, yet regretting, as Jesus did the young Pharisee's folly, the defects which marred his character.

ART. IV.—THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH IN THE UNITED STATES.

THE first Lutherans to settle in this country were emigrants from Holland, who about the year 1623 located in New Amsterdam, now New York. Being fewer in number than their Reformed fellow-countrymen, they were refused the presence of a Lutheran pastor, denied the privilege of holding a Lutheran service, and were variously persecuted for resisting the effort made to extort from them the promise to bring up their children in the Dordrecht faith. The fine for preaching a Lutheran sermon was £100, and that for attending a Lutheran service was £25. Their "conventicles" were broken up, and many were imprisoned.* They finally obtained full religious liberty in 1664, when the colony fell into the hands of the British.

In the year 1638 two ship-loads of Swedish Lutherans * Broadhead's History of New York, vol. i, pp. 582, 617, 634, 642; also, Documentary History of New York, vol. iii, p. 103.

entered the Delaware, and took up their abode in and around Fort Christina, now Wilmington, Del. Here they immediately erected a house of worship, and enjoyed the ministrations of the Rev. Reorus Torkillus, who had accompanied them from Sweden. Their second pastor, Campanius, in 1649 translated Luther's Small Catechism into the language of the Delawares, and preached the Gospel to the Indians several years before John Eliot began his missionary labor in New England.

The tide of German emigration to this country set in about the year 1680, but we have no account of a German Lutheran congregation having been organized, or of a German Lutheran pastor, until 1703, when the Rev. Justus Falkner began to preach in Montgomery County, Pa. From 1708 to 1713 colonies of Lutherans settled along the Hudson, and organized congregations which still exist in Dutchess, Columbia, and Ulster Counties in the State of New York. During the first two or three decades of the eighteenth century, large numbers of Lutherans settled in Pennsylvania, principally along the Swatara and the Tulpehocken, and in and around Philadelphia. The spiritual destitution of these new-comers was so great that in 1733 they sent a deputation to Germany who reported themselves as being "in a land full of sects and heresy, without ministers and teachers, schools, churches, and books."

In 1734 a colony of refugees from Romish persecution in the Salzburg, with two ministers, settled on the Savannah, in Georgia; and a little later settlements of Lutherans began to be made in Virginia and North Carolina, and before the middle of the century a Lutheran Church had been organized as far north as Waldoborough, Maine. But these various communities of Lutherans were widely separated from each other, and had no bond of union except a common language and a common faith. With few exceptions they were alike destitute of the living ministry and of the means of grace, save as they had carried with them the Bible, the Catechism, the Hymnbook and Arndt's True Christianity, by which they still supported the glow of piety in their hearts.

The year 1742 opened a new era in the arrival of Dr. Henry Melchior Mühlenberg, who is justly esteemed the Patriarch of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. This truly apostolic man, thoroughly educated, deeply imbued with

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