BETWEEN the ages of forty-five and fifty years,—having suffered and renounced whatever was necessary to educate him for so high a mission,—Charles Lamb wrote the “Essays of Elia.” It is hard to think of an angel with a stoop and a bad habit of stuttering. We do not usually imagine that the garments of the Seraphim smell of stale tobacco smoke, or that the ministers of grace are liable to make puns without provocation. Still of such supernatural souls as Lamb it has been written:—

  If there is anything in evidence, Lamb in a London tavern, stuttering out his jokes through thick clouds of tobacco smoke, was even then an inhabitant of the same heaven in which Thomas à Kempis wrote the “Imitatio Christi,”—the heaven which belongs to the pure in heart. “St. Charles,” Coleridge called him, after having known him from the time they were Blue-Coat boys together in Christ’s Hospital School. Nothing short of saintliness would have made him the great humorist he is. His life was a long tragedy. An innocent victim of a hereditary taint, he was confined in a madhouse at twenty-one. Only a few months after his release, his sister Mary, in a violent paroxysm of insanity, killed her mother and was committed to a lunatic asylum, with the prospect of life imprisonment among the insane. Her brother, scarcely more than a boy and with “the means of a day laborer,” pledged himself to the authorities to nurse and care for her if they would make him her guardian, and it was to this martyrdom that he devoted himself, sacrificing his hopes of happiness with Alice Winterton, and remaining a bachelor all his life. He lived with his sister as her guardian and nurse, watching for the recurrence of the symptoms of her madness, and when they appeared, going with her to the asylum that she might be confined until restored to herself. Out of this touching love between the brother and sister came the “Tales from Shakespeare” and “Poetry for Children,” “by Charles and Mary Lamb,”—joint productions which make it evident that Lamb sought to inspire his sister with his own spirit of hope and cheerfulness. That the “Tales from Shakespeare,” which will be read with delight by children as long as the language in which they are written remains intelligible, could have been the result of the struggle for self-possession of two supersensitive minds under the constant dread of the recurrence of madness, is one of those miracles of contradiction which glorify human nature and human sanity in the teeth of Lombroso and all others who, having discovered that “genius is a neurosis,” imagine that it is nothing more.

  In Lamb it was the fruit of ripening manliness in that form which is called “Virtue,”—the quality of the “Vir,” or fighting man, who can stand at the front in the first rank, stooped down behind his shield, but unyielding when the lines are broken and every one else is retreating. “Certa tanquam miles bonus!” writes Thomas à Kempis of such a one as Lamb. “Fight like a good soldier!” So does the metaphor of struggle endured and of blows taken without shrinking inhere in the meaning of such patient virtue as this—virtue which makes manliness divine even in its weakness.

  Lamb’s humor is clearly a result of consciousness of his own infirmities and of the clear perception such self-knowledge gives him of the infirmities of others. Grote, Gibbon, and Macaulay, Locke, Descartes, and Plato, the historians, and the philosophers know much and tell much of human nature, but those who know more than they care or dare to tell do not write history or philosophy. They write such fairy tales as those of De la Motte Fouqué, and Hans Christian Andersen, and such essays as those of Lamb. The tenderness of Andersen and the playfulness of Lamb are marks of the acute sensitiveness of physical organization which must accompany the responsiveness of the body to the control of mind. One of the marks of self-mastery in the physical suffering such responsiveness entails is humor. All humor is the result of a reaction. It may grow more and more brutal as the brutal nature is strengthened by reaction against the higher; but in Lamb it grows more and more tender and delicate as he ripens for translation to some heaven where—let us hope—reactions are no more; where there are no headaches in unlimited punches, and no dryness of tongue after such long nights of innumerable pipes as preceded the “Renunciation” in which Lamb wrote:—

  Delightful as is the secret wisdom of Lamb’s essays, it is said that his conversation was even more so. Never preaching and never prosing himself, he is reputed to have furnished frequent texts to Coleridge—who did both. “I think, Charles,” said Coleridge, “you never heard me preach.” “I ne-ne-never heard you do anything else,” replied Lamb with severe gravity, and no doubt with a deliberately protracted stutter.

  Lamb’s antecedents were anything but patrician. His father, who was “engaged in his youth in domestic service,” never rose higher than a clerkship for a bencher in the Inner Temple. Seven years in the Blue-Coat School of Christ’s Hospital was all the scholastic education Charles ever had. In 1789 he became a clerk in the South Sea House, and in 1792 in the India House, where he worked until his fiftieth year. He was then retired on a pension of £400 a year, but he wrote little after this and lived to enjoy his moneyed ease for only nine years. He died December 27th, 1834, and when Professor Morley tells us that on that date he “entered into his heavenly rest,” we will not think of questioning it. But as for the kind of a heaven it is he entered, we can only guess that there will be a London in it with no fogs, and many clubrooms, inhabited exclusively by people who are fit to associate with the author of “The Complaint of the Decay of Beggars.”