adhesive oleaginous-O, call it not fat! but an indefinable sweetness
growing up to it-the tender blossoming of fat-fat cropped in the
bud-taken in the shoot-in the first innocence-the cream and
quintessence of the child pig's yet pure food, the lean, no lean but a
kind of animal manna.
See him in the dish, his second
cradle, how meek he lieth! Would'st thou have had this innocent
grow up to the grossness and indocility which too often accompany
maturer swinehood? Ten to one he would have grown up a glutton,
a sloven, an obstinate disagreeable animal-wallowing in all manner
of filthy conversation-from these sins he is happily snatched away.

Ere sin could blight or sorrow fade
Death came with kindly care.

His memory is odoriferous; no clown curseth while his stomach half rejecteth the rank bacon; no coal-heaver bolteth him in reeking sausages; he hath a fair sepulchre in the grateful stomach of the judicious epicure; and for such a tomb might be content to die.

66

Charles Lamb has been described as a rare instance of the combination of a keen critical faculty with a tenderness and bright humour which made it impossible for him to be cruel." "His Essays of Elia are full of this bright humour, this tender criticism, a ripple of pleasant laughter runs through them, just broken here and there by a sob," there is "a desperate brightness always quivering on the verge of tears," they are not merely amusing sketches of life and character, there is a strong undercurrent of genuine humanity, playful badinage is mingled with pathos, the "attic salt" seasons wholesome material, gentle satire never degenerates into bitter sarcasm, there are no barbed and pointed shafts of ridicule, there is no chastising with scorpions, the merriment is always kindly, never scornful; they were not written to lash abuses or punish iniquity, there is nothing suggestive of Juvenal, nothing reminiscent of Voltaire.

The fame of Lamb as an essayist has eclipsed his reputation as a poet, and diverted attention from his merit

as a critic, he is known as the "Gentle Elia; but it was to poetry and criticism that his youthful energies were devoted, and to poetry he returned in his old age. A few sonnets, included in Coleridge's earliest volume of poems, were the first-fruits of his genius, and almost the last book he published was a volume of album verses. "As a poet," says Mr. Bates, "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 prefect finish, and are marked by a wondrously refined artifice of rhyme, rhythm, phrase, and condensation of thought." If Lamb is a minor poet, it is for the same reason that Gray and Collins are minor poets, and that Amos and Micah are minor prophets, the qualifying adjective having reference to quantity rather than quality of production.

As a critic Lamb possessed what is more valuable than learning, wide reading or completeness of logical outfit. He was gifted with almost unerring instinct. Men like Coleridge and Southey sent him their manuscripts before publication to receive the advantage of preliminary criticism. He was 66 an accessory before the fact" as regards many a noble production that England will not "willingly let die." He was foremost among the select few who recognised the genius of Burns and of Wordsworth, while as yet their title to fame was generally ignored. It is to Lamb we are chiefly indebted for the revival of interest in writers of the sixteenth and seven

teenth centuries, whose works had sunk into unmerited oblivion. He did a work not unlike that done in a different province by the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings. He awakened an intelligent interest in the literary monuments of the past. He drank deeply from that "well of English undefiled" the poetry of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. His letters to literary friends often consist almost entirely of appreciations and criticisms in a field at that time seldom explored. To writers like Beaumont and Fletcher the ordinary reader of the day might have said "Shakespeare we know, and Bacon we know, but who are ye?" Lamb did more perhaps than anyone to dissipate this ignorance.

But in whatever Lamb wrote, whether poetry, essays, or criticism, it is the personality of the man himself that leaves the most lasting impression upon the mind, the author overshadows his work, our interest is greater in the speaker than in the speech. His poetry is more popular than his criticism because of the stronger subjective element; his essays are preferred to his poetry because in them his self-revelation is most complete, the revelation of a character amusing in its quaintness, admirable in its devotion.

St. Charles! for Thackeray called thee so;
Saint at whose name our fond hearts glow,
See now this age of tedious woe.
That snaps and snarls!

Thine was a life of tragic shade;

A life of care and sorrow made:

But nought could make thine heart afraid,
Gentle Saint Charles.

Encumbered dearly with old books,

Thou by the pleasant chimney nooks,
Didst laugh, with merry-meaning looks,
Thy griefs away.

We, bred on modern magazines,
Point out how much our sadness means,

And some new woe our wisdom gleans
Day by dull day.

Lamb was a great deal more than a wit, he was a humorist. Wit is a surface gleam. It lights up incongruity with a sudden flash. It is wisdom's distortion, wisdom inverted as it were. A sudden glimpse is seen of a truth in a ludicrous relation. It is the province of wit to detect false analogies, wrong representations. Wit is purely intellectual. But humour, although allied to wit, has a different basis. It belongs to the feelings. It is warm and sunny. Wit is cold and glittering, it sparkles like frost on the panes. Humour is kindly, wit often caustic. Humour is less brilliant, less keen, more human, tender, sympathetic. Wit may be superficial. Humour is often profound. One of the easiest ways of testing a man's moral and intellectual position is to ascertain what he considers witty or humorous. If nothing moves his risible muscles, he is a man to admire at a distance. As Schopenhauer sarcastically observed: "The Philistine is distinguished by a dull dry kind of gravity, akin to that of animals." We depart at once from the menagerie where they live. "Here comes a fool," said Lamb one day, "let us be grave."

Lamb was a prince of humourists, his essays are brimful of drollery, a veritable mine of good things, and his quaint fancy was not by any means confined to his literary productions. It made its appearance in season and out of season. Coleridge asked him one day if "he had ever heard him preach?" "I never heard you do anything else," said Lamb. Wordsworth discoursing on Shakespeare remarked that "He himself could have written Hamlet if the story of the Prince of Denmark had

been before him." "O, I say," said Lamb, "Here's Wordsworth says he could have written Hamlet, if he'd had the mind." A lady expressing great love for children said, "And how do you like babies, Mr. Lamb." "Boiled Ma'am," was the startling reply. At a dinner party, being offered some cheese in a rather advanced condition, he asked for a piece of string, "that he might lead it home." Once Barry Cornwall said something he thought rather brilliant, and was thus complimented, "Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and better." "Really, Mr. Lamb," said the head of his office, rebuking him for unpunctuality, "you come very late." "Yes," was the answer, "but consider how early I go." Leigh Hunt, rather bored with one of Coleridge's theological disquisitions, exclaimed, "What makes Coleridge talk in that way about heavenly grace and the holy church and that sort of thing?" "Ah,” replied Lamb, "there is a great deal of fun in Coleridge."

In 1825, the year that the Essays of Elia were completed, Charles Lamb was superannuated, retiring upon a pension; he had never been considered a particularly efficient clerk, and was now delighted at the prospect of freedom.

I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity-for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his time to himself. I am no longer clerk. I am

Retired Leisure. I am to be met with in trim gardens. I am already come to be known by my vacant face and careless gesture, perambulating at no fixed pace nor with any settled purpose. I walk about; not to and from. They tell me a certain cum dignitate air, that has been buried so long with my other good parts, has begun to shoot forth in my person. I grow into gentility perceptibly. When I take up a newspaper, it is to read the state of the opera, opus operatum est. I have done all that I came into this world to do, I have worked task-work, and have the rest of the day to myself.