"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick." Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."

The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the same—if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station," whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not happen to be acquainted with the actual biography, we can build up in our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The very diversity of theme and manner—this varying change from grave to gay, from lively to severe—is indeed but a reflection of life itself, which with the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles with tears, and even to the most unfortunate imparts something of pleasure and delight.

The "Essays of Elia" may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range of their subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified by the author's individuality both in point of view and in treatment, that they are all informed with what has been termed Lamb's calm and self-reposing spirit, that they are all more or less strongly marked by that style which, based upon a loving study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers, was yet for the most part distinguished by concision and ease. He took from his models their richness of language without their prolixity, their felicity of expression without their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he unconsciously employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his own.

It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as this to indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied are the themes which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of "Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay—the first of the series to appear in the "London Magazine," the one to stand in the forefront of the volume—Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House" as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier—he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame:

Then at the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while—peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic—insubstantial—like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past." The names may have been mostly fantastic—in one case we know that it was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is known to delvers among dead books—the types are immortal. In this first essay we find in such sentences as "their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers," an illustration of Lamb's wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic might term an informal superfluity of syllables.

The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of "Oxford in the Vacation," was written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of Cambridge, though Elia touching upon matters concerning church holidays breaks off with—

Then follows a passage eminently characteristic of Elia's happy manner of playing with a theme:

The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago," should be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a scholar less fortunately circumstanced than himself, a boy far from his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he had sustained the closest friendship—S. T. Coleridge. That friend he thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently been quoted:

"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about Coleridge—under his nomme de guerre of Comberbatch—and his theory that "the title to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." "Should he go on acting upon this theory," adds Elia, "which of our shelves is safe?"

"New Year's Eve" suggests a train of reflections—not, in the platitudinous manner of looking back over the errors of the past year and making good resolutions for the coming one—but on mortality generally, and on the passing of time and the passing of life:

Next comes the immortal "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,"—Mrs. Battle, whose wish for "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."

"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a passage such as this:

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like—as in the pasture—'forty feeding like one.'"

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master

The next essay—the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had not appeared in the "London Magazine"—is a pretty bit about "Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life—without success—to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."

"Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children. They can at most but give them direction." He suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and incidentally gives a characteristically quaint turn in "My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive. I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them."

In "My Relations" we have an excellent instance of Lamb's veiled autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister and at once proceeds to a close and analytical portrait of his "cousin," James Elia, that supposed personage being Charles Lamb's own brother John, who died in November, 1821, a few months after the original appearance of this essay. "Mackery End in Hertfordshire," continues the theme of relations with another striking piece of portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia's, Bridget (really Mary Lamb). In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat by her terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the "cousins'" visit to unknown cousins at the old place in "the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire."

Dealing with the subject of "Modern Gallantry" Elia shows how it is wanting in the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in compliments to youth and beauty but in reverence to sex.

"The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple" is one of the essays richest at once in personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those subtle literary touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the whole. A sketch of the author's father as Lovel was quoted from this essay in the opening chapter. Elia's observation, his felicity of expression, his originality of thought, a hint of his playfulness, may all be recognized in the very commencement of this delicious essay:

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact—verisimilitudes, not verities—or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history."

Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and criticism, contrasting—from Milton's "Paradise Lost"—the feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."

With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens. "At school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."

"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's days when visiting grandmother Field:

This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially pathetic as anything in our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every reading though known almost by heart.

The essay on "Distant Correspondents," in the form of a playful epistle to a friend, B. F. (i.e., Barron Field, also a contributor to the "London Magazine") has much that is characteristic of the writer. In it he plays—as he does in other letters to distant friends—on the way in which "this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents" renders writing difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some indication—we have several such indications in his letters—of his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends, or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as actualities.

The next essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," might be cited as one of those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb's work as essayist. It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it deals with an out-of-the-way subject in a surprisingly engaging manner, and it is full of those quaint turns of expression, those more or less recondite words which Elia re-introduced from the older writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as he had re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here is a passage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once of Elia's manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of describing them. Elia is discussing "Saloop."

In this essay also we have an example—one of how many!—of Lamb's happiness in hitting upon an illustration, even though it be of the ludicrous; mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy's teeth he adds, "It is, as when

"A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" is perhaps the most widely known of all the essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in the daintiness of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary presentation, its deliberate acceptance of wild improbability as historic basis, all unite to give it special place in the regard of readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is that of a small Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father's flimsy hut so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the conflagration. The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if it were alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new dish. Lamb plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his fingers and applied them to his mouth—with precisely the same sequel which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.

"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a delicate—perhaps partly ironical—description of a bachelor's objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage—partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors, "On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death, open with a "Character of the late Elia"—an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the essays, "Blakesmoor in H——shire," the author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "noble Marble Hall, with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve CÆsars—stately busts in marble—ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood:

"Poor Relations" is a beautiful example of humour—provoking to smiles while touching to tears—with a wonderful introductory piling up of definitions: "A Poor Relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature,—a piece of impertinent correspondency,—a preposterous shadow, lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,—an unwelcome remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made its triple appeal to Lamb—from the study, from the front, and from the boards—inspired the next three essays, "Stage Illusions," "To the Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." The first is an example of subtle criticism showing how it is that we get enjoyment out of unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to the "exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us," that things are not altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston we have at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine character portrait.

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," might be cited as one of the most characteristic of the essays of Elia. It illustrates the writer's happiest style, and indicates his taste. In its opening passages are words and phrases which have become quotations "familiar in the mouth as household words" to all book-lovers. Lamb takes as his text a remark made by Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's "Relapse": "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's self with the forced products of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own."

He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books; the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read: "I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone and reading 'Candide'!"—"The Old Margate Hoy" gives reminiscences of a visit to the popular resort—with some uncomplimentary asides at Hastings—in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged his pen in his conversational fondness for a pun:

In the "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line—

and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by the greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: "It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare."

"Captain Jackson" is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would not be poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver sugar-tongs, a homely bench a sofa, and so on. As Elia concludes:

With the next essay of this collection, that on "The Superannuated Man," we come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia's transmutations of matters of private experience into precious literature. The paper is as autobiographic as any of his letters: some slight changes—as of the East India House to the name of a city firm—are made, but for the rest it is a record of his retirement with a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the change from having to go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being suddenly free:

"The Genteel Style in Writing" is a delightful enforcement of the "ordinary criticism" that "my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing," though Elia prefers to differentiate them as "the lordly and the gentlemanly." The essay is, for the most part, a plea, with illustrations, for a consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and engaging writer. "Barbara S——" is a slight anecdote expanded into a sympathetic little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back and received the moiety.

"The Tombs in the Abbey" is an indignant protest—in the form of a letter to Southey—against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, except during service times, to all but those who could afford to pay for admission; it closes with a touch of humour where Elia suggests that the Abbey had been closed because the statue of Major AndrÉ had been disfigured, and adds: "The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic?" Then, in "Amicus Redivivus," we have an accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly into the New River opposite Lamb's very door, made to supply matter for treatment in Elia's pleasantest vein.

"Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney" gives a dozen of Sidney's sonnets with appreciatory comment. "Newspapers Thirty Years Ago" is particularly interesting for its reminiscences of the days when Lamb wrote half a dozen daily jests for "The Morning Post" at sixpence per jest, and for its sketches of Daniel Stuart and Fenwick, two diversely typical journalists of a century since. "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art" is a criticism of the prevailing taste in art matters, inspired by Martin's "Belshazzar's Feast," and contrasts the modern methods of painting as—a Dryad, "a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks" (a figure that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad), with the older method illustrated by Julio Romano's dryad, in which was "an approximation of two natures." "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age" is a graceful, sparkling piece of humorous fancy:

I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hours; twelve little, merry whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day, Shrove Tuesday, and a few such Moveables, who had lately shifted their quarters.

Well, they all met at last, foul Days, fine Days, all sorts of Days, and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail! fellow Day,—well met—brother Day—sister Day,—only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, all white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake—all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous. The rest came—some in green, some in white—but old Lent and his family were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, dripping; and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always does; and Doomsday sent word—he might be expected.