The style is the man. The rule was thus confined within the compass of a brief sentence by a distinguished French naturalist, and if there be examples which form exceptions to that rule, Charles Lamb is certainly not one of them. Markedly individual himself he reveals that individuality in his writings so strongly that there are not wanting critics who consider themselves able to decide from the turn of a phrase or the use of a word whether Lamb did or did not write any particular piece of work which it may have been sought to father on him. In the manner of presentation of his writings we have at once the revelation of catholic literary taste and wide reading combined with the deep seriousness and the almost irresponsible whimsicality of the man himself. The man who was loved by all who knew him in the flesh—so true is it that le style c'est l'homme—reveals himself as a man to be loved by those who can only know him through the medium of the written word. Where he has given rein to his fancy or his imagination, he is humorous, whimsical, inventive; where he is dealing with matters of serious fact or criticism he is simple, clear, and to the point. Quotations already given would go to illustrate this, but two further contrasting passages may be added. The first is from "Table Talk," the second from a critical essay on the acting of Shakespeare's tragedies.

Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression. As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it. "For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few English writers who have written so differently on different themes." Placing special emphasis on his favourites—which besides the three named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance—it may be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style, though it must be remembered—it cannot be forgotten with a volume of his essays or letters in hand—that there is always that marked but indescribable "individuality of manner" which pervades the varied whole.

Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the essay in which he—not very felicitously—brackets Elia and Geoffrey Crayon in the "Spirit of the Age," says:

That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the best of English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was always in pure literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those who love things of the mind which can only be passed from generation to generation by means of books. In this we may recognize the reason—wholly unconscious to the writer—for the allusiveness of his style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or passage to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such allusiveness was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient classics; but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.

Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts. In one of his early letters to Coleridge where he mentions having just finished reading Chapman's Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a phrase in that translation, says with gusto, "what endless egression of phrases the dog commands." The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of it. He had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding words that had passed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of re-introducing them to enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it naturally, even as though inevitably, and without any such air of coxcombical affectation as would have destroyed the flavour of the whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the thought and modes of expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods that his use of obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite unconscious.

The egotism of Elia's style in addressing his readers has been said to be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be little doubt that it was so—but only in a measure, for it is something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the natural attitude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not from self-consciousness but from the lack of it. In putting his opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel that Lamb did so almost unconsciously, because it was for him the easiest way of expressing himself. It was not, in fact, egotism at all in the commonly accepted sense of meaning, too frequent or self-laudatory use of the personal pronoun.