1775—Born February 10, Crown Office Row, Temple. 1782—Enters Christ’s Hospital School. 1789—Leaves school and enters service of South Sea House. 1792—Enters service East; India Company. 1795—Resides at No. 7 Little Queen St., Holborn. 1796—Publishes four Sonnets in volume of “Poems by S. T. Coleridge.” 1797—Removes to No. 45 Chappel St., Pentonville.—Contributes to “Poems by S. T. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Charles Lloyd.” 1800—Writes Epilogue to Godwin’s “Antonio.” 1801—Removes to No. 16 Mitre-Court Buildings, Temple. 1802—Publishes “John Woodvil.” 1806—Produces “Mr. H.”—a Farce, at Drury Lane. 1807—Publishes “Tales from Shakespear”—“Mrs. Leicester’s School.”—Writes Prologue for “Faulkener,” by Godwin. 1808—Publishes “Specimens of Dramatic Poets”—“The Adventures of Ulysses.” 1809—Publishes “Poetry for Children.”—Removes to No. 4 Inner Temple Lane.—Lives at No. 34 Southampton Buildings. 1811—Publishes “Prince Dorus.” 1813—Writes Prologue for Coleridge’s “Remorse.” 1817—Removes to No. 20 Russell St., Covent Garden. 1818—Publishes “Collected Works,” 2 vols. 1820—Contributes to the London Magazine. 1823—Removes to Colebrooke (Colnbrooke) Row, Islington.—Publishes “Essays of Elia,” First Series. 1825—Retires from East India House.—Contributes numerous articles to Hone’s “Every Day Book.” 1826—Removes to Enfield. 1827—Contributes Introduction to “The Garrick Plays,” in Hone’s “Table Book.” 1829—Lodges in Enfield. 1830—Publishes “Album Verses.”—Contributes “De Foe’s Works of Genius” to Wilson’s “Memoirs of Daniel De Foe.” 1831—Publishes “Satan in Search of a Wife.” 1832—Removes to Bay Cottage, Edmonton. 1833—Publishes “Last Essays of Elia.”—Contributes Epilogue to “The Wife,” by J. Sheridan Knowles. 1834—Charles Lamb dies, December 27, at Edmonton.

Personal

	Dear Charles! whilst yet thou wert a babe, I ween
	That Genius plunged thee in that wizard fount
	Hight Castalie: and (sureties of thy faith)
	That Pity and Simplicity stood by,
	And promised for thee, that thou shouldst renounce
	The world’s low cares and lying vanities,
	Steadfast and rooted in the heavenly Muse,
	And washed and sanctified to Poesy.

  I am glad that you think of him as I think; he has an affectionate heart, a mind sui generis; his taste acts so as to appear like the unmechanic simplicity of an instinct—in brief, he is worth an hundred men of mere talents. Conversation with the later tribe is like the use of leaden bells—one warms by exercise, Lamb every now and then irradiates, and the beam, though single and fine as a hair, is yet rich with colours, and I both see and feel.

  A day of great pleasure. Charles Lamb and I walked to Enfield by Southgate, after an early breakfast in his chambers…. After tea, Lamb and I returned. The whole day most delightfully fine, and the scenery very agreeable. Lamb cared for the walk more than the scenery, for the enjoyment of which he seems to have no great susceptibility. His great delight, even in preference to a country walk, is a stroll in London. The shops and the busy streets, such as Thames Street, Bankside, etc., are his great favorites. He, for the same reason, has no great relish for landscape painting. But his relish for historic painting is exquisite.

  I forget whether I had written my last before my Sunday evening at Haydon’s—no, I did not, or I should have told you, Tom, of a young man you met at Paris, at Scott’s, of the [name of] Ritchie. I think he is going to Fezan, in Africa; then to proceed if possible like Mungo Park. He was very polite to me, and inquired very particularly after you. Then there was Wordsworth, Lamb, Monkhouse, Landseer, Kingston, and your humble servant. Lamb got tipsy and blew up Kingston—proceeding so far as to take the candle across the room, hold it to his face, and show us what a soft fellow he was.

  There was L— himself, the most delightful, the most provoking, the most witty and sensible of men. He always made the best pun, and the best remark in the course of the evening. His serious conversation, like his serious writing, is his best. No one ever stammered out such fine, piquant, deep, eloquent things in half a dozen sentences as he does. His jests scald like tears; and he probes a question with a play upon words…. There was no fuss of cant about him: nor were his sweets or his sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation.

  Charles Lamb, born in the Inner Temple, 10th February, 1775; educated in Christ’s Hospital; afterwards a clerk in the Accountants’ Office, East India House; pensioned off from that service, 1825, after thirty-three years’ service; is now a gentleman at large; can remember few specialities in his life worth noting, except that he once caught a swallow flying (teste suā manu). Below the middle stature; cast of face slightly Jewish, with no Judaic tinge in his complexional religion; stammers abominably, and is therefore more apt to discharge his occasional conversation in a quaint aphorism, or a poor quibble, than in set and edifying speeches; has consequently been libelled as a person always aiming at wit; which, as he told a dull fellow who charged him with it, is at least as good as aiming at dullness. A small eater, but not drinker; confesses a partiality for the production of the juniper berry; was a fierce smoker of tobacco, but may be resembled to a volcano burnt out, emitting only now and then an occasional puff. Has been guilty of obtruding upon the public a tale in prose, called “Rosamond Gray,” a dramatic sketch named “John Woodvil,” a “Farewell Ode to Tobacco,” with sundry other poems and light prose matter, collected in two slight crown octavos, and pompously christened his works, though, in fact, they were his recreations; and his true works may be found on the shelves of Leadenhall Street, filling some hundred folios. He is also the true Elia, whose essays are extant in a little volume. He died 18– much lamented. Witness his hand.

  Heigh ho! Charles Lamb I sincerely believe to be in some considerable degree insane. A more pitiful, ricketty, gasping, staggering, stammering Tomfool I do not know. He is witty by denying truisms and abjuring good manners. His speech wriggles hither and thither with an incessant painful fluctuation, not an opinion in it, or a fact, or a phrase that you can thank him for—more like a convulsion fit than a natural systole and diastole. Besides, he is now a confirmed, shameless drunkard; asks vehemently for gin and water in strangers’ houses, tipples till he is utterly mad, and is only not thrown out of doors because he is too much despised for taking such trouble with him. Poor Lamb! Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius!

	Once, and once only have I seen thy face,
	Elia! once only has thy tripping tongue
	Run o’er my heart, yet never has been left
	Impression on it stronger or more sweet,
	Cordial old man! what youth was in thy years,
	What wisdom in thy levity, what soul
	In every utterance of thy purest breast!
	Of all that ever wore man’s form, ’tis thee
	I first would spring to at the gate of Heaven.

  I say tripping tongue for Charles Lamb stammered and spoke hurriedly. He did not think it worth while to put on a fine new coat to come down to see me in, as poor Coleridge did, but met me as if I had been a friend of twenty years’ standing; indeed, he told me I had been so, and showed me some things I had written much longer ago and had utterly forgotten. The world will never see again two such delightful volumes as “The Essays of Elia;” no man living is capable of writing the worst twenty pages of them. The Continent has Zadig and Gil Blas, we have Elia and Sir Roger de Coverley.

	Genius triumphed over seeming wrong,
	And poured out truth in works by thoughtful love
	Inspired—works potent over smiles and tears.
	And as round mountain-tops thy lightning plays,
	Thus innocently sported, breaking forth
	As from a cloud of some grave sympathy,
	Humour and wild instinctive wit, and all
	The vivid flashes of his spoken words….
	At the centre of his being, lodged
	A soul by resignation sanctified:
	And if too often, self-reproached, he felt
	That innocence belongs not to our kind,
	A power that never ceased to abide in him,
	Charity, ’mid the multitude of sins
	That she can cover, left not his exposed
	To an unforgiving judgment from just Heaven.
	Oh, he was good, if e’er a good Man lived!

  Mr. Lamb’s personal appearance was remarkable. It quite realized the expectations of those who think that an author and a wit should have a distinct air, a separate costume, a particular cloth, something positive and singular about him. Such unquestionably had Mr. Lamb. Once he rejoiced in snuff-color, but lattery his costume was inveterately black—with gaiters which seemed longing for something more substantial to close in. His legs were remarkably slight,—so indeed was his whole body, which was of short stature, but surmounted by a head of amazing fineness…. His face was deeply marked and full of noble lines—traces of sensibility, imagination, suffering, and much thought. His wit was in his eye, luminous, quick, and restless. The smile that played about his mouth was ever cordial and good-humored; and the most cordial and delightful of his smiles were those which he accompanied his affectionate talk with his sister, or his jokes against her.

	Here sleeps beneath this bank, where daisies grow,
	The kindliest sprite earth holds within her breast;
	In such a spot I would this frame should rest,
	When I to join my friend far hence shall go.
	His only mate is now the minstrel lark,
	Who chaunts her morning music o’er his bed,
	Save she who comes each evening, ere the bark
	Of watch-dog gathers drowsy folds, to shed
	A sister’s tears. Kind Heaven, upon her head
	Do thou in dove-like guise thy spirit pour,
	And in her aged path some flow’rets spread
	Of earthly joy, should Time for her in store
	Have weary days and nights, ere she shall greet
	Him whom she longs in Paradise to meet.

  His angry letter to me in the Magazine arose out of a notion that an expression of mine in the Quarterly Review would hurt the sale of Elia: some one, no doubt, had said that it would. I meant to serve the book, and very well remember how the offense happened. I had written that it wanted nothing to render it altogether delightful but a saner religious feeling. This would have been the proper word if any other person had written the book. Feeling its extreme unfitness as soon as it was written, I altered it immediately for the first word which came into my head, intending to remodel the sentence when it should come to me in proof; and that proof never came.

  It cannot be denied or concealed that Lamb’s excellencies, moral and intellectual, were blended with a single frailty; so intimately associating itself with all that was most charming in the one, and sweetest in the other, that, even if it were right to withdraw it wholly from notice, it would be impossible without it to do justice to his virtues. The eagerness with which he would quaff exciting liquors, from an early period of life, proved that to a physical peculiarity of constitution was to be ascribed, in the first instance, the strength of the temptation with which he was assailed. This kind of corporeal need; the struggles of deep thought to overcome the bashfulness and the impediment of speech which obstructed its utterance; the dull, heavy, irksome labours which hung heavy on his mornings, and dried up his spirits; and still more, the sorrows which had environed him, and which prompted him to snatch a fearful joy; and the unbounded craving after sympathy with human feelings, conspired to disarm his power of resisting when the means of indulgence were actually before him. Great exaggerations have been prevalent on this subject, countenanced, no doubt, by the “Confessions” which, in the prodigality of his kindness, he contributed to his friend’s collection of essays and authorities against the use of spirituous liquors; for, although he had rarely the power to overcome the temptation when presented, he made heroic sacrifices in flight. His final abandonment of tobacco, after many ineffectual attempts, was one of these—a princely sacrifice.

  He was petite and ordinary in his person and appearance. I have seen him sometimes in what is called good company, but where he has been a stranger, sit silent, and be suspected for an odd fellow.

  In the words of our dear departed friend, Charles Lamb, “You good-for-nothing old Lake Poet,” what has become of you? Do you remember his saying that at my table in 1819, with “Jerusalem” towering behind us in the painting room, and Keats and your friend Monkhouse of the party? Do you remember Lamb voting me absent, and then making a speech descanting on my excellent port, and proposing a vote of thanks? Do you remember his then voting me present? I had never left my chair—and informing me of what had been done during my retirement, and hoping I was duly sensible of the honor? Do you remember the Commissioner (of Stamps and Taxes) who asked you if you did not think Milton a great genius, and Lamb getting up and asking leave with a candle to examine his phrenological development? Do you remember poor dear Lamb, whenever the Commissioner was equally profound, saying: “My son John went to bed with his breeches on,” to the dismay of the learned man? Do you remember you and I and Monkhouse getting Lamb out of the room by force, and putting on his greatcoat, he reiterating his earnest desire to examine the Commissioner’s skull?… Ah! my dear old friend, you and I shall never see such days again! The peaches are not so big now as they were in our days.

  I was sitting one morning beside our editor, busily correcting proofs, when a visitor was announced, whose name, grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice, like Tom Pipes calling down the hold through the hatchway, did not resound distinctly on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in came a stranger,—a figure remarkable at a glance, with a fine head, on a small spare body, supported by two almost immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables, of a by-gone fashion, but there was something wanting, or something present about him, that certified he was neither a divine, nor a physician, nor a school-master: from a certain neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a Quaker in black. He looked still more (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a New Old Author, a living Anachronism, contemporary at once with Burton the Elder and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful “How d’ye,” and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles, that ever brightened a manly countenance, held out two fingers to the editor. The two gentlemen in black soon fell into discourse; and whilst they conferred, the Lavater principle within me set to work upon the interesting specimen thus presented to its speculations. It was a striking intellectual face, full of wiry lines, physiognomical quips and cranks, that gave it great character. There was much earnestness about the brows, and a great deal of speculation in the eyes, which were brown and bright, and “quick in turning;” the nose, a decided one, though of no established order; and there was a handsome smartness about the mouth. Altogether, it was no common face—none of those willow-pattern ones, which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries;—but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware, one to the set—unique, quaint. No one who had once seen it could pretend not to know it again. It was no face to lend its countenance to any confusion of persons in a Comedy of Errors. You might have sworn to it piecemeal—a separate affidavit for every feature.

  In these miscellaneous gatherings, Lamb said little, except when an opening arose for a pun. And how effectual that sort of small shot was from him, I need not say to anybody who remembers his infirmity of stammering, and his dexterous management of it for purposes of light and shade. He was often able to train the roll of stammers into settling upon the words immediately preceding the effective one; by which means the key-note of the jest or sarcasm, benefiting by the sudden liberation of his embargoed voice, was delivered with the force of a pistol shot. That stammer was worth an annuity to him as an ally of his wit. Firing under cover of that advantage, he did triple execution; for, in the first place, the distressing sympathy of the hearers with his distress of utterance won for him unavoidably the silence of deep attention; and then, whilst he had us all hoaxed into this attitude of mute suspense by an appearance of distress that he perhaps did not really feel, down came a plunging shot into the very thick of us, with ten times the effect it would else have had.

  I have spoken of the distinguished individuals bred at Christ-Hospital, including Coleridge and Lamb, who left the school not long before I entered it. Coleridge I never saw till he was old. Lamb I recollect coming to see the boys, with a pensive, brown, handsome, and kingly face, and a gait advancing with a motion from side to side, between involuntary consciousness and attempted ease. His brown complexion may have been owing to a visit in the country, his air of uneasiness to a great burden of sorrow. He dressed with a Quaker-like plainness.

  In point of intellectual character and expressions finer face was never seen, nor one more fully, however vaguely, corresponding with the mind whose features it interpreted. There was the gravity usually engendered by a life passed in book-learning, without the slightest tinge of that assumption and affectation which almost always attend the gravity so engendered; the intensity and elevation of general expression that mark high genius, without any of its pretension and its oddity; the sadness waiting on fruitless thoughts and baffled aspirations, but no evidences of that spirit of scorning and contempt which these are apt to engender. Above all, there was a pervading sweetness and gentleness which went straight to the heart of every one who looked on it; and not the less so, perhaps, that it bore about it an air, a something, seeming to tell that it was not put on—for nothing would be more unjust than to tax Lamb with assuming anything, even a virtue, which he did not possess—but preserved and persevered in, spite of opposing and contradictory feelings within, that struggled in vain for mastery. It was a thing to remind you of that painful smile which bodily disease and agony will sometimes put on, to conceal their sufferings from the observation of those they love…. His head might have belonged to a full-sized person, but it was set upon a figure so petite that it took an appearance of inappropriate largeness by comparison. This was the only striking peculiarity in the ensemble of his figure; in other respects it was pleasing and well-formed, but so slight and delicate as to bear the appearance of extreme spareness, as if of a man air-fed, instead of one rejoicing in a proverbial predilection for “roast-pig.” The only defect of his figure was that the legs were too slight even for the slight body.

  Of middle height, with brown, and rather ruddy complexion, gray eyes expressive of sense and shrewdness, but neither large nor brilliant; his head and features well-shaped, and the general expression of his countenance quiet, kind, and observant, undergoing rapid changes in conversation, as did his manner, variable as an April day, particularly to his sister, whose saint-like good humour and patience were as remarkable as his strange and whimsical modes of trying them. But the brother and sister perfectly understood each other, and “Charles,” as she always called him, would not have been the “Charles” of her loving heart without the pranks and oddities which he was continually playing off upon her—and which were only outnumbered by the instances of affection, and evidences of ever watchful solicitude with which he surrounded her.

  Lamb, from the dread of appearing affected, sometimes injured himself by his behaviour before persons who were slightly acquainted with him. With the finest and tenderest feelings ever possessed by man, he seemed carefully to avoid any display of sentimentality in his talk.

  The fact that distinguished Charles Lamb from other men was his entire devotion to one grand and tender purpose. There is, probably, a romance involved in every life. In his life it exceeded that of others. In gravity, in acuteness, in his noble battle with a great calamity, it was beyond the rest. Neither pleasure, nor toil ever distracted him from his holy purpose. Everything was made subservient to it. He had an insane sister, who, in a moment of uncontrollable madness, had unconsciously destroyed her own mother; and to protect and save his sister—a gentlewoman, who had watched like a mother over his own infancy—the whole length of his life was devoted. What he endured, through the space of nearly forty years, from the incessant fear and frequent recurrence of his sister’s insanity, can now only be conjectured. In this constant and uncomplaining endurance, and in his steady adherence to a great principle of conduct, his life was heroic.

  He never kept a letter; except a couple or so: and heartily despised “relics,” especially of the sentimental sort. Thus, when a traveller brought him acorns, from Virgil’s tomb, he amused himself with throwing them at the hackney coachmen that passed by.

  There were few modern volumes in his collection; and subsequently, such presentation copies as he received were wont to find their way into my own book-case, and often through eccentric channels. A Leigh Hunt, for instance, would come skimming to my feet through the branches of the apple-trees (our gardens were contiguous); or a Bernard Barton would be rolled down stairs after me, from the library door. “Marcian Colonna” I remember finding on my window-sill, damp with the night’s fog; and the “Plea of the Midsummer Fairies” I picked out of the strawberry bed.

  Lamb was not a saint. He drank sometimes to excess. He also smoked tobacco. But if ever a good, great man walked the earth—good and great in the profoundest and noblest sense—full of that simple human charity, and utter renunciation of self, which is the fulfilling of the highest law and the holiest instinct—it was that man with a face of “quivering sweetness,” nervous, tremulous;… so slight of frame that he looked only fit for the most placid fortune,—but who conquered poverty and hereditary madness, and won an imperishable name in English literature, and a sacred place in every generous heart, all in silence, and with a smile.

  With all the light that has been thrown upon every circumstance of Lamb’s life, and with the best disposition of the part of the biographers to find evidence that he sacrificed a conjugal happiness which was within his reach for the sake of his sister, no other facts bearing upon the question, however remotely, have been brought to light. It is surprising that a man of Lamb’s sensibility—it would be surprising in the case of any man—should not once, during the forty years that elapsed between his rejection by Alice and his death, have “fallen in love,” in any sense authorized by the most liberal construction of those words. Had he been in love with a dozen women in the course of that long period, he would only have resembled his fellow-bachelors, and it would by no means have followed that, in continuing single, he practised heroic self-denial. The biographers and reviewers who are so fond of ringing changes upon Lamb’s imputed self-sacrifice, and upon the happiness which wife and children might have added to his life, strangely neglect to advert to a circumstance which would have raised grave doubts as to the propriety of his marrying had there been no other obstacle. We refer, of course, to his liability to madness.

  His style of playful bluntness when speaking to his intimates was strangely pleasant—nay, welcome: it gave you the impression of his liking you well enough to be rough and unceremonious with you: it showed you that he felt at home with you. It accorded with what you knew to be at the root of an ironical assertion he made—that he always gave away gifts, parted with presents, and sold keepsakes. It underlay in sentiment the drollery and reversed truth of his saying to us, “I always call my sister Maria when we are alone together, Mary when we are with our friends, and Moll before the servants.”

  As to his kindness and practical benevolence, Mr. Ogilvie declared that it could not be overstated. His sympathies were so easily won that he was often imposed upon, yet he never learned to be suspicious. He had been known to wear a coat six months longer, that he might spare a little money to some needy acquaintance. There was hardly ever a time when he did not have somebody living upon him. If he was freed from one client, another would soon arise to take his place. A poor literary aspirant, or vagabond, especially, he could not resist, and he regularly had one or more on his hands. He would even take them to his house, and let them stay there weeks and months together.

  I must say I think his Letters infinitely better than his Essays; and Patmore says his Conversation, when just enough animated by Gin and Water, was better than either: which I believe too. Procter said he was far beyond the Coleridges, Wordsworths, Southeys, &c. And I am afraid I believe that also.

  No one who has passed an hour in the company of Charles Lamb’s “dear boy” can ever lose the impression made upon him by that simple, sincere, shy, and delicate soul. His small figure, his head, not remarkable for much besides its expression of intelligent and warm goodwill, and its singular likeness to that of Sir Walter Scott; his conversation, which had little decision or “point” in the ordinary sense, and often dwelt on truths which a novelty-loving society banishes from its repertory as truisms, never disturbed the effect, in any assemblage, of his real distinction. His silence seemed wiser, his simplicity subtler, his shyness more courageous than the wit, philosophy, and assurance of others.

  I availed myself of Charles Lamb’s friendly invitation on Tuesday, August 5, 1834. On reaching his cottage—which stood back from the road (nearly opposite the church), between two houses which projected beyond it, and was screened by shrubs and trees—I found that he was out, taking his morning’s stroll. I was admitted into a small, panelled, and agreeably shaded parlour. The modest room was hung round with engravings by Hogarth in dark frames. Books and magazines were scattered on the table and on the old-fashioned window seat. I chatted awhile with Miss Lamb—a meek, intelligent, very pleasant, but rather deaf elderly lady, who told me that her brother had been gratified by parts of my poem (“Emily de Wilton”) and had read them to her. “Elia” came in soon after—a short, thin man. His dress was black, and he wore a capacious coat, breeches and gaiters, and a white neck-handkerchief. His dark and shaggy hair and eyebrows, heated face and very piercing jet-black eyes gave to his appearance a singularly wild and striking expression. The sketch of him in Fraser’s Magazine gives a true idea of his dress and figure, but his portraits fail to represent adequately his remarkably “fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence,” as Hazlitt described it. He grasped me cordially by the hand, sat down, and taking a bottle from a cupboard behind him, mixed some rum and water. On another occasion his sister objected to this operation, and he refrained. Presently after he said, “May I have a little drop now? only a leetle drop?” “No,” said she; “be a good boy.” At last, however, he prevailed, and took his usual draught.

  Very often, Charles Lamb was one of the party at the residence of Coleridge, with his gentle, sweet, yet melancholy countenance; for I can recall it only as bearing the stamp of mournfulness, rather than of mirth. Even when he said a witty thing, or made a pun, which he was too apt to do, it came from his lips (jerked out in the well-known semi-stutter) as if it had been a foreboding of evil; certainly, his merriment seemed forced.

  Lamb was buried in the quiet little churchyard at Edmonton. A tall, flat stone, with an inscription by Cary, the translator of Dante, which is neither happy nor quite coherent, marks the spot, which is just beyond the path on the southwest of the church.

  Lamb’s letters from first to last are full of the philosophy of life; he was as sensible a man as Dr. Johnson. One grows sick of the expressions, “poor Charles Lamb,” “gentle Charles Lamb,” as if he were one of those grown-up children of the Leigh Hunt type, who were perpetually begging and borrowing through the round of every man’s acquaintance. Charles Lamb earned his own living, paid his own way, was the helper, not the helped; a man who was beholden to no one, who always came with gifts in his hand, a shrewd man capable of advice, strong in council. Poor Lamb indeed! Poor Coleridge, robbed of his will; poor Wordsworth, devoured by his own ego; poor Southey, writing his tomes and deeming himself a classic; poor Carlyle, with his nine volumes of memoirs, where he

	“Lies like a hedgehog rolled up the wrong way,
	Tormenting himself with his prickles”—

call these men poor, if you feel it decent to do so, but not Lamb, who was rich in all that makes life valuable or memory sweet. But he used to get drunk. This explains all.

  A man of noticeable and impressive presence:—small of stature, fragile of frame, clad in clothing of tightly fitting black, which was clerical as to cut and well-worn as to texture; his “almost immaterial legs,” in Tom Hood’s phrase, ending in gaiters and straps; his dark hair, not quite black, curling crisply about a noble head and brow—“a head worthy of Aristotle,” Leigh Hunt tells us; “full of dumb eloquence,” are Hazlitt’s words; “such only may be seen in the finer portraits of Titian” John Forster put it; “a long, melancholy face, with keen, penetrating eyes,” we learn from Barry Cornwall; brown eyes, kindly, quick, observant; his dark complexion and grave expression brightened by the frequent “sweet smile, with a touch of sadness in it.” This visitor, of such peculiar and piquant personality—externally, “a rare composition of the Jew, the gentleman, and the angel,” to use his own words of the singer Braham—is Charles Lamb.

	Not here, O teeming City, was it meet
	Thy lover, thy most faithful, should repose,
	But where the multitudinous life-tide flows
	Whose ocean-murmur was to him more sweet
	Than melody of birds at morn, or bleat
	Of flocks in Spring-time, there should Earth enclose
	His earth, amid thy thronging joys and woes,
	There, ’neath the music of thy million feet.
	In love of thee this lover knew no peer.
	Thine eastern or thy western fane had made
	Fit habitation for his noble shade.
	Mother of mightier, nurse of none more dear,
	Not here, in rustic exile, O not here,
	Thy Elia like an alien should be laid!

  The Blue-coat boy had already become known and famous far beyond his modest ambition. Little by little his quaint fancies had taken hold in the popular heart, and being so unpretending the critics gave him help rather than hindrance. When he died, his heroic life of self-sacrifice and self-surrender was known to few besides his intimate friends. He never claimed the least merit for surrendering life’s ambitions at the very start, taking up its burdens in the path of duty. His quiet generosity to friends in need was known only to himself and the recipients of his charities; but the fragrance of his sweet, blameless life clung around his memory, and expanded as the years passed, until his life, as well as his works, gave him his place among the best beloved of the English essayists.

	Past cheat of years the comrades of his mood—
	The quiet old men sitting in the sun;
	Strict maids; gray clerks; and children fair and blest;
	And that sad woman of his house and blood—
	And still he hides his hurts from dearest one;
	But with the whole world shares the stingless jest!

	TO THE MEMORY
	of
	CHARLES LAMB,
	Died 27th Decr. 1834, aged 59.
	Farewell, dear friend: That smile, that harmless mirth
	No more shall gladden our domestic hearth;
	That rising tear with pain forbid to flow,
	Better than words, no more assuage our woe;
	That hand outstretched, from small but well-earned store,
	Yield succour to the destitute no more.
	Yet art thou not all lost; thro’ many an age
	With sterling sense and humour shall thy page
	With many an English bosom, pleased to see
	That old and happier vein revived in thee,
	This for our earth, and if with friends we share
	Our joys in heaven, we hope to meet thee there.
	Also, MARY ANNE LAMB,
	Sister of the above,
	Born 3rd Decr. 1767, Died 20th May 1847.

Poetry

  Mr. C. Lamb has produced no poems equal to his prose writings: but I could not resist the temptation of transferring into this collection his “Farewell to Tobacco,” and some of the sketches in his “John Woodvil;” the first of which is rarely surpassed in quaint wit, and the last in pure feeling.

  There is … much quaint feeling in his verses; he has used the style of the good old days of Elizabeth in giving form and utterance to his own emotions; and, though often unelevated and prosaic, every line is informed with thought, or with some vagrant impulse of fancy…. He gives portraits of men whose manners have undergone a city-change; records sentiments which are the true offspring of the mart and the custom-house, and attunes his measure to the harmony of other matter than musical breezes and melodious brooks.

  “John Woodvil” contains passages which would not have done dishonour to the great dramatists of Shakspeare’s golden age; and “The Farewell to Tobacco,” in these pages, is such a piece of verse as one might imagine “Elia” would write.

  Charles Lamb was a true poet, but not a great one. His genius was peculiar and wayward; and his mind seemed so impregnated with the dramatists preceding or contemporary with Shakspeare—Marlowe, Webster, Ford, Shirley, Marston, Massinger, and their compeers, that he could not help imitating their trains of thought. Yet he struck out a few exquisite things—sparks from true genius, which can never be extinguished; as “The Old Familiar Faces,” “To Hester,” “The Virgin of the Rocks,” and the descriptive forest-scene in “John Woodvil,” which, it is said, Godwin, having found somewhere extracted, was so enchanted with, that he hunted—of course vainly—through almost all the earlier poets in search of it.

To see the sun to bed, and to arise, &c.

  Lamb’s poems, as a rule, are insipid, and artificially natural; he belongs to that school of which Ambrose Phillips is generally—though without sufficient ground, perhaps—regarded as the founder. Namby-pambyism is surely not so modern.

  As a Poet, Charles Lamb is once again original. He has produced but little, it is true; but that little is perfect in its own way, and ensures for its author a niche all to himself in the temple of Parnassus. What more pathetic than his lines on his mother, first printed in the “Final Memorials;” his “Old Familiar Faces;” “The Three Friends” and “The Sabbath Bells”? Then there is the fierce energy of the “Farewell to Tobacco,” and “The Gipsy’s Malison,” with its almost demoniacal force of expression. These are all pieces of perfect finish, and are marked by a wondrously refined artifice of rhyme, rhythm, phrase, and condensation of thought.

  Charles Lamb’s nosegay of verse may be held by the small hand of a maiden, and there is not in it one flaunting, gallant flower; it is, however, fragrant with the charities of home, like blossoms gathered in some old cottage croft.

  In the literary tribunal, Lamb the essayist and Lamb the poet are two individualities, and it is well that for the present at least the distinction should be kept clear. Rightly perceived—and Lamb himself would have so perceived it—he was more of a lay-assistant than a priest at the high altar of poetry. While Coleridge and Wordsworth performed the rites, he witnessed, worshipped, and aided, but did not officiate—unless it were in the humble capacity of censer-bearer. It is true he has written in metre and in rhyme, but the result, generally, is verse rather than poetry, and some may add, and not very good verse either.

  Lamb’s poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness—like that in his speech,—with none of Rogers’s glibness and currency, and none of his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than a dress-coat.

  It is of course true that his popularity rests more with his essays than with his poems, which form only the smaller portion of his writings, but the same qualities which make his prose such delightful reading are found crystallised and perfected in his verse. His distinctive characteristic is quaint originality, coloured, but not formed by his keen appreciation of, and familiar acquaintance with, the works of our old poets and dramatists. He never has any tendency to fall into the manner of “the lake poets,” though he was the intimate friend of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. He was not insensible to the beauties of nature, or to the charm of fine scenery; but he was more at home amidst the world of books and the haunts of men…. As an original humourist he has never been surpassed, and this quality, no less than the depth of sensibility and pathetic power, in his poems attests that the mild jocularity of Wordsworth, who called him “Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,” was not misplaced.

Rosamund Gray, 1798

  A TALE | of | ROSAMUND GRAY | and | OLD BLIND MARGARET. | by CHARLES LAMB. | London, | Printed for Lee and Hurst, | No. 32, Pater-noster Row, | 1798.

  With it came, too, Lamb’s works…. What a lovely thing is his “Rosamund Gray!” How much knowledge of the sweetest and deepest parts of our nature in it! When I think of such a mind as Lamb’s—when I see how unnoticed remain things of such exquisite and complete perfection—what should I hope for myself, if I had not higher objects in view than fame!

  Rosamund, with the pale blue eyes and the “yellow Hertfordshire hair,” is but a fresh copy of his Anna and his Alice. That Rosamund Gray had an actual counterpart in real life seems certain, and the little group of cottages, in one of which she dwelt with her old grandmother, is still shown in the village of Widford, about half a mile from the site of the old mansion of Blakesware. And it is the tradition of the village, and believed by those who have the best means of judging, that “Rosamund Gray” (her real name was equally remote from this, and from Alice W—n) was Charles Lamb’s first and only love. Her fair hair and eyes, her goodness, and (we may assume) her poverty, were drawn from life. The rest of the story in which she bears a part is of course pure fiction. The real Anna of the sonnets made a prosperous marriage, and lived to a good old age.

  It is crude and formless, the raw elements of a story clumsily thrust into a common frame. The idyllic picture of Rosamund and her grandmother (embalming probably a memory of his Anna Simmons) has a charm; but the horrible fate of the young girl is a jarring dissonance, sudden and arbitrary as the invading shock of madness in which that early love had issued.

Letters

  Lamb’s letters are not indeed model letters like Cowper’s. Though natural to Lamb, they cannot be called easy. “Divine chit-chat” is not the epithet to describe them. His notes are all high. He is sublime, heartrending, excruciatingly funny, outrageously ridiculous, sometimes possibly an inch or two overdrawn. He carries the charm of incongruity and total unexpectedness to the highest pitch imaginable.

  As for Lamb, those who love him at all love him so well that it matters little which of his letters they read, or how often they have read them before. Only it is best to select those written in the meridian of his life. The earlier ones are too painful, the later ones too sad. Let us take him at his happiest, and be happy with him for an hour; for, unless we go cheerfully to bed, the portals of morn open for us with sullen murmur, and fretful dreams, more disquieting than even the troubled thoughts of day, flit batlike round our melancholy pillows.

  His correspondence must remain an integral part of the age, which it immediately concerns, as much as that of Walpole; and in this capacity and aspect, if in no other, he has laid himself, so to speak, across an epoch. Any one who bestows even a cursory study on these inimitable productions must perceive and allow that the serious style largely preponderates, and that of broad fun there is little more than an occasional vein. His wit is more usually delicate and playful—sometimes bordering on pathos. Here and there, among the letters, there are spasms of boisterous and rollicking gaiety parallel with the horse-play in the Inner Temple Lane times; but it makes little indeed in so voluminous a body of matter.

General

  The person you have thus leagued in a partnership of infamy with me is Mr. Charles Lamb, a man who, so far from being a democrat, would be the first person to assent to the opinions contained in the foregoing pages: he is a man too much occupied with real and painful duties—duties of high personal self denial—to trouble himself about speculative matters. Whenever he has thrown his ideas together, it has been from the irresistible impulse of the moment, never from any intention to propagate a system, much less any “of folly and wickedness.”

  Elia in his happiest moods delights me: he is a fine soul; but when he is dull, his dulness sets human stupidity at defiance. He is like a well-bred, ill-trained pointer. He has a fine nose, but he won’t or he can’t range. He keeps always close to your foot, and then he points larks and titmice. You see him snuffing and smoking and brandishing his tail with the most impassioned enthusiasm, and then drawn round into a semicircle, he stands beautifully—dead-set. You expect a burst of partridges or a towering cock-pheasant, when lo, and behold! away flits a lark, or you discover a mouse’s nest, or there is absolutely nothing at all. Perhaps a shrew has been there the day before. Yet if Elia were mine, I would not part with him, for all his faults.

  Read “Elia,” if the book has not fallien in your way. It is by my old friend Charles Lamb. There are some things in it which will offend, and some which will pain you, as they do me; but you will find in it a rich vein of pure gold.

  His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit-pipes…. There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion:—that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view more genuine, and has given more “vital signs that it will live,” than a thing of yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something substantial in it.

  Poor Charles Lamb, what a tender, good, joyous heart had he! What playfulness! what purity of style and thought!

  Of his own writings it is now superfluous to speak; for, after having encountered long derision and neglect, they have taken their place among the classics of his language. They stand alone, at once singular and delightful. They are all carefully elaborated; yet never were works written in a higher defiance to the conventional pomp of style. A sly hit, a happy pun, a humorous combination, lets the light into the intricacies of the subject, and supplies the place of ponderous sentences…. In all things he is most human. Of all modern writers, his works are most immediately directed to give us heart-ease and to make us happy.

  Charles Lamb’s “Specimens of English Dramatic Poets” is of deeper interest. He was a nobler workman, and he carries us on through whole scenes by a true unerring emotion. He was a poetical mind laboring in poetry.

  We never rise from one of his essays without a feeling of contentment. He leads our thoughts to the actual, available springs of enjoyment. He reconciles us to ourselves; causing home-pleasures, and the charms of the wayside, and the mere comforts of existence, to emerge from the shadow into which our indifference has cast them, into the light of fond recognition. The flat dull surface of common life, he causes to rise into beautiful basso-relievo. In truth, there are few better teachers of gratitude than Lamb.

  Such wit, such humor, such imagination, such intelligence, such sentiment, such kindliness, such heroism, all so quaintly mixed and mingled, and stuttering out in so freakish a fashion, and all blending so finely in that exquisite eccentric something which we call the character of Charles Lamb, make him the most lovable of writers and men.

  Their [“Essays”] egotism is chastened and subdued, but their personality is never relinquished: it is not philosophy that selects its problem, and proceeds to solve it—it is Charles Lamb who, philosophising through whim and fancy, allures you to listen to Charles Lamb.

  There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne’s Essays; and Charles Lamb’s are scented with the primroses of Covent Garden.

  Charles Lamb was no teacher of his time, and had no commanding or immediate influence on his contemporaries. He lifted up no banner, summoned no contending hosts to the conflict, did no battle on the side of faction or party, and was possessed of no vast intellectual powers. But this he was—one of the most affectionate, most lovable, most piquantly imperfect of dear, good fellows that ever won their way into the human heart, and one of the most hearty, most English, most curiously felicitous humourists—emphatically one of the best that ever lived. He has left us in his works a perennial source of refining pleasure, full of freshness and moral health, and kindly communicative warmth, over which countless readers will bend with smiling face or moistened eye; and the sad will feel a solace, the weary gather heart’s-ease, the cold and narrow of nature may warm them and expand in the generous glow to be found in the writings of Charles Lamb.

  The most supremely competent judge and exquisite critic of lyrical and dramatic art that we have ever had.

  The restorer of the old drama.

  His humour was thoroughly original; his command of language, though peculiar, was perfect; an air of genuine good feeling pervaded every essay as unmistakably as his wit.

  With all Lamb’s whims and oddities, the foundations of his being were serious and substantial.

  He was not one of those voluminous writers of whom we possess such a goodly array of tomes, that we are content to let the waifs and strays take their chance and float whither they will. He was never, indeed, a professional writer. Tied down during the best years of his life to office-duties, and not reaching the age of three-score, the total sum of his writings, after every nook and cranny has been searched that could yield anything buried and forgotten, is still comprisable in less than eight hundred pages, though one or two little items are still unavoidably wanting.

  The exquisite literary faculty of Charles Lamb revelled in detecting beauties which had been covered with the dust of oblivion during the reign of Pope. His appreciation was intensified by that charm of discovery which finds its typical utterance in Keats’s famous sonnet. He was scarcely a more impartial judge of Fletcher or Ford than “Stout Cortes” of the new world revealed by his enterprise. We may willingly defer to his judgment of the relative value of the writers whom he discusses, but we must qualify his judgment of their intrinsic excellence by the recollection that he speaks as a lover.

  In the making of prose he realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in him!—bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the Welt-schmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with him; but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies and making the most of things!

  Poor Lamb has not a little to answer for, in the revived relish for garbage unearthed from old theatrical dung-heaps. Be it jest or earnest, I have little patience with the Elia-tic philosophy of the frivolous.

  How … the shyness of Lamb’s nature,—his love of quip, and whimsey, and old black-letter authors,—peeps out in his style, with its antique words, and quaint convolutions, and doublings back on itself! Dean Swift would have torn to pieces a lamb like a wolf; but the loving “Elia” would have tried to coax a wolf into a lamb.

  Let anyone who wants a true alterative or relief from Carlyle’s grim and black-browed chuckle of almost brutal self-satisfaction in such self-revelation, take down Elia’s essays, and read that on “Poor Relations” carefully to the end; and then thank Heaven for the beautiful, bountiful gift of true humorous geniality, and, what is yet higher and better, faith in human nature, which is, pace Carlyle, happily preserved to us in literature that he would dub cockney and treat with a malignant scowl; as if it were possible for a cockney to have a heart, or that it were always possible even for a great Scotchman to have a big one.

  He is one of those writers whom we would not have changed in the least degree—whom, indeed, we cannot conceive of being changed. Had he been greater in certain directions than he was, he would have been, as a whole, less perfect. For instance, he was not possessed of very profound perceptions, but had he been a man of greater penetration than he was, his mind might have been marked by a difficulty and painful gravity from which he was altogether free; facility and lightness were essential parts of his character, as we now know him. Then Lamb had a mind that was very fully flowered out. There is nothing in his character to demand or to reward a painstaking inquiry. For this reason, perhaps, he is less attractive to the critic than many other less perfect and less distinguished characters. But most readers are not critics. They read for amusement, and not for the pleasure of investigation. To them, therefore, the fact that they can understand Lamb at a glance, and that he is almost as familiar to them as one of their own family, is the cause of their liking to read him.

  He was the acutest as well as most tolerant of critics. Not even Coleridge, though covering larger ground in literature, has surpassed Lamb in his special department of poetical criticism. His comments on the English dramatic poets of the Elizabethan age are, indeed, unequalled in suggestiveness and masterly appreciation of character.

  No true reader, wherever found, can fail to acknowledge the power of Elia. He is, in the best sense of the word, one who writes for writing’s sake—not because he has much to tell us, but because it is a pleasure to him to make friends with us, to jest and sigh and trifle, to play some whimsical trick upon us, to transport us in a moment, all unwittingly, from laughter into weeping, to play upon all the strings of our hearts.

	Beloved beyond all names of English birth,
	More dear than mightier memories! gentlest name
	That ever clothed itself with flower-sweet fame,
	Or linked itself with loftiest names of old
	By right and might of loving; I, that am
	Less than the least of those within thy fold,
	Give only thanks for them to thee, Charles Lamb.

  It is in vain to attempt to convey an idea of the impression left by Lamb’s style. It evades analysis. One might as well seek to account for the perfume of lavender, or the flavour of quince. It is in truth an essence, prepared from flowers and herbs gathered in fields where the ordinary reader does not often range. And the nature of the writer—the alembic in which these various simples were distilled—was as rare for sweetness and purity as the best of those enshrined in the old folios—his “midnight darlings.” If he had by nature the delicate grace of Marvell, and the quaint fancy of Quarles, he also shared the chivalry of Sidney, and could lay on himself “the lowliest duties,” in the spirit of his best-beloved of all, John Milton. It is the man, Charles Lamb, that constitutes the enduring charm of his written words. He is, as I have said, an egotist—but an egotist without a touch of vanity or self-assertion—an egotist without a grain of envy or ill-nature.

  In some respects, though in some only, Charles Lamb’s humour anticipates the type of humour which we now call, in the main, American. When, for instance, he gravely narrated the origin of the Chinese invention of roast pig, in the burning down of a house,—when he told a friend that he had moved just forty-two inches nearer his beloved London,—and again, when he wrote to Manning in China that the new Persian Ambassador was called “Shaw Ali Mirza,” but that the common people called him “Shaw Nonsense,” we might think we were listening to Artemus Ward’s or Mark Twain’s minute and serious nonsense. But for the most part, Charles Lamb’s humour is more frolicsome, more whimsical, and less subdued in its extravagance; more like the gambolling of a mind which did not care to conceal its enjoyment of paradox, and less like the inward invisible laughter in which the Yankees most delight.

  Americans take a peculiar delight in the humor of Charles Lamb, for he is one of the foremost of American humorists. On the roll which is headed by Benjamin Franklin, and on which the latest signatures were made by “Mark Twain” and Mr. Bret Harte, no name shines more brightly than Lamb’s. It may be objected by the captious that he was not an American at all; but surely this should not be remembered to his discredit: it was a mere accident of birth. Elia could have taken out his naturalization-papers at any time…. He was an Englishman,—nay, more, a Cockney,—indeed, a Cockney of the strictest sect; but he had parts not unworthy of American adoption. He had humor, high and dry, like that which England is wont to import from America in the original package.

  With a wit that was almost unrivalled, he had the indigenous faculties of courtesy, generosity, humanity, and benignity. Scarcely any modern essayist so feeds and fertilizes the mind as Charles Lamb; for he was endowed with that inexplicable power called charm, which holds the reader like a spell. He makes us love him, as we turn his pages, as few authors are ever enabled to do.

  It detracts nothing from the unique charm of “Elia,” and it will be most clearly recognised by those who know “Elia” best, that Lamb constantly borrows from Browne, that the mould and shape of his most characteristic phrases is frequently suggested directly by Sir Thomas, and that though there seldom can have been a follower who put more of his own in his following, it may be pronounced with confidence, “no Browne, no Lamb,” at least in the forms in which we know the author of “Elia” best, and in which all those who know him best, though they may love him always, love him most.

  He is and will forever be more than a mere author to those that know him. He is a presence, a presiding genius; he goes in and out with you, haunts you in the kindest, gentlest way.

  What I felt most keenly was the intellectual starvation I suffered in the strenuous pioneer life of Minnesota in 1856. About this time there came along a man who conducted the book business on a plan I have never heard of since. He carried the priced catalogue of Derby & Jackson, and took orders for any book on the list. I bought in this way a copy of Charles Lamb’s Works. It was my only book in a land where books were not, and it was no end of advantage to me. I was, just at this period of my life, deeply interested in settling the six days of creation; for in that time, when Darwin and evolution were yet below the horizon, our chief bother was to get the stratified rocks correctly created according to Moses. I had read Hugh Miller with eagerness, and had even followed the wire-drawn speculations in Hitchcock’s “Religion of Geology.” To a youth who has assumed such cosmical tasks Lamb could not but be wholesome. His delicious and whimsical humor is a great prophylactic against priggery. I cleave still to my stout one-volume copy of Lamb. There are many better editions, but none so good for me as this, with its margins covered by pencil notes, humiliating enough now, for they reveal the crudities, prejudices, immaturities of the young man who wrote them.

  The most striking note of Lamb’s literary criticism is its veracity. He is perhaps never mistaken. His judgments are apt to be somewhat too much coloured with his own idiosyncrasy to be what the judicious persons of the period call final and classical, but when did he ever go utterly wrong either in praise or in dispraise?

  It is not easy to discuss that love for books, which in some men is indeed wonderful, passing the love of women, without quoting Charles Lamb. For he is of all later classics the ideal book-lover; one who adores not only their mental but their physical beauty: no mere æsthetic admirer, content to “worship from afar with distant reverence;” but one who must fondle his treasures.

	In accents sublime,
	In sweetness of diction that touches our hearts,
	In mirth, which a flavor of sadness imparts,
	In a jest, or a pun, or a sharp epigram,
	There is none like our dear, witty charming Charles Lamb.

  Lamb’s use of the short sentence was incomparably freer, and as Mr. Pater might have said, “blither” than that of any of his predecessors. In sentence-length, indeed, he exhibits all the variability of insanity…. In spite of now and then a long but harmless parenthesis, Lamb knew the value of the paragraph structure—knew it better than Coleridge did, or De Quincey. Hardly one of his shorter sections but is an artistic whole. The order is loose. The mass is often perfect—the topic striking the eye instantly, and the paragraph ending with words that deserves emphasis…. The fact is that Lamb’s style, on any subject Lamb would have been willing to touch, would be easier to follow than Coleridge’s, no matter how far afield the whimsical Elia might wander. For there are no long intervals between Lamb’s propositions, no involved restrictions of those propositions, no necessity of supplying anything except a few obvious verbs and the sense of a few freakish vocables.

  I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople. Measured by the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! What a tender humor; what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and invites and is soothing and never wearies.

  His most original work was the “Essays of Elia,” in which he renewed the lost grace of the Essay, and with a humour not less gentle, more surprising, more self-pleased than Addison’s.

  With Charles Lamb we have a quaintness of archaicism which loses all trace of artificiality only by the magic touch of genius.

  Lamb can scarcely be classed along with any other essayist; the archness and piquancy of his humour, if they sometimes remind one of Sterne, had for the most part an ancestry older than Addison and Steele, and it is only by going back to the writers of the seventeenth century that one fully detects the atavism of his style…. The obliquity of Lamb’s genius precluded in his own day, as it still precludes, the possibility of successful imitation; he created no new school of essayists, and he left no abiding mark on the development of English prose; but he is within certain well-defined limits one of the most artistic exponents of the essay, and the power of fully appreciating the delicacy of his work is one of the surest indications of a literary epicure.

  A still better critic than either Cowper or Landor, the sure-footed Charles Lamb, who in his innumerable appreciations of writers both in verse and prose, hardly ever makes a false step, save from some affectionate bias of the heart, hardly ever pronounces a judgment that has not been cordially endorsed by posterity.

  He had a poetry of his own, wholly distinct from that of either of his friends, though allied to both; the poetry of great cities, which Wordsworth did not know, the poetry of the local, from which Coleridge’s “thirst for the absolute” perpetually estranged him. In spiritual beauty of character neither they nor any other, save Shelley, of his greater contemporaries approached him. The tragic horror of fear and memory which underlay his life, and the exquisite wit and humour which irradiated its surface, were his alone…. Imagination of a more ethereal kind, as in Shelley, or of a grosser and more concrete kind, as in Scott, or of the remote and mythological kind as in Southey, attracted him little. His own imagination glances off, as it were, upon the edge of humour, and becomes a glittering spray of freaks and sallies. He has, from first to last, a boyish delight in play. His overflowing charity was materially helped by his gift for constructing comedy out of the meanest stuff of human nature. In the beggar who cheated him he saw a comedian playing a part, and joyously paid his money for the performance; he was peculiarly ready to believe in the art which plays with the elements of life—which creates a fantastic world of its own—like humanity, but detached from the conditions of human beings.

  Whose humour delighted in floating a galleon paradox and wafting it as far as it would go.

  Elia is a name of the imagination; but it was borne by an old acquaintance, an Italian who was a fellow-clerk at the South-Sea House when Lamb was a boy there, thirty years before he sat down to write these Essays; and, as a piece of pleasantry, he borrowed his friend’s true face to mask his own. He went, he tells us, to see the Elia of flesh and blood, and laugh over the liberty he had taken, but found the Italian dead; and the incident—the playfulness of the odd plagiarism ending unexpectedly in a solemn moment, a pathetic close—is so in character with the moods of these pages, that even their maker could not have invented better what life gave into his hands. The name had devolved upon him now, he said; he had, as it were, unknowingly adopted a shade, and it was to go about with him thenceforth, and watch at his grave after he too should depart. For two years he used the ruse of this ghost of a name, but the uncanniness of it was his own secret; to the reader of the London Magazine, in which he published, Elia was—what it is to us—a name of the eternal humorist in life’s various crowd.