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; Thine was a life of tragic shade; A life of care and sorrow made: But nought could make thine heart afraid, Encumbered dearly with old books, Thou by the pleasant chimney nooks, We, bred on modern magazines, And some new woe our wisdom gleans 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. 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 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 how early I go." 66 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. But the "rest of the day," although free from uncongenial drudgery, was not exempt from unpleasant vicissitudes. Lamb was restless, and moved from place to place; his sister's malady grew worse, the attacks more frequent and of longer duration; the "old familiar faces" disappeared one by one; amid a host of acquaintances he grew more and more lonely; an adopted daughter married and left the home; the home itself was broken up; brother and sister went into lodgings, where the latter could have the constant care of an attendant; Charles was not sixty, but health was failing; during the last few years he wrote nothing except an occasional poem for the album of a friend. Lamb had many friends, among them some of the most distinguished citizens in the Republic of Letters, Leigh Hunt, Southey, Wordsworth, Rogers, Hazlitt, Talfourd, but the dearest of all was Coleridge. For him he entertained an affection that bordered on veneration. For fifty years they lived in the closest intimacy, and “in death they were not divided." In July, 1834, Coleridge passed away, and Lamb never recovered the shock. "His great and dear spirit haunts me," he said, "never saw I his likeness, nor probably can the world see it again.” “I seem to love the house he died at more passionately than when he lived." "What was his mansion is consecrated to me a chapel." The memory of his school-fellow and lifelong friend never forsook him. One day a gentleman asked him to write a few lines for his literary album. He wrote them. Their subject was Coleridge. They were the last he ever wrote. In December, 1834, five months after his friend, he died. So passed away this bright and gentle spirit, whose life was illumined by genius, sanctified by affliction, leaving behind him a memory not likely soon to fade. Playful, gentle, loving Elia, we need not go to Edmonton to gaze upon thy tomb, thou hast erected an enduring monument in our English affections, and thy remembrance is kept green in the hearts of men. Lamb is not to be read at all seasons and under every variety of circumstance. We should not take him to read on the shingle of the sea shore. Some books may be read to the accompaniment of the monotonous plashing of the waves, for others we want a quiet afternoon in some rural spot, such as Gray describes in his Elegy, before the sun sets and all the land is dark. But Elia is a book for a winter's evening in a cosy room, when the curtains are drawn close, and only the distant hum of tired humanity wending its way homeward disturbs the stillness. "To gain immortality," said Schopenhauer, "an author can only be a man who, over the wide earth, will seek his like in vain, and offer a palpable contrast with everyone else in virtue of his unmistakable distinction." Lamb largely satisfies this severe requirement, "over the wide earth" we "seek his like in vain;" he belongs to no particular school of thought; he had no literary ancestry; he left no disciples; he is representative only of himself. Like Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, George Wither, Laurence Sterne, he is a solitary figure standing alone, a palpable contrast with everyone else in virtue of his unmistakable distinction." His place is not among the intellectual leaders of mankind whose influence is felt from century to century. His name will probably never be one to conjure with among the masses of the reading public, they will continue to purchase, for shelf decoration, works of a parentage more august, and give their real attention to the ephemeral produce of the bookstalls. He never was and never will be, in the wide sense of the term, a popular writer whose productions flood the market and are found 66 D |