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Charles Lamb. With an Introduction BY GEORGE WOODBERRY E. TORONTO GEORGE N. MORANG AND COMPANY LIMITED IQOO Copyright, 1S9S, BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 68785- JOHN WILSON AND SON, CAMBRIDGE. INTRODUCTION. /"CHARLES LAMB really came into this ^-x world of man under the name of Elia; as a " son of memory," so was he christened, and by it he is known, for it is the name, not of his creature-life, but of his better part. His personality finds expression in it, freed from the sad or mean accidents of his mortal career; and it recalls onlywhat in him was touched with the light and shadow of an inconstant genius or penetrated with the simplicity of the heart, and yet leaves room for that eccentricity, that strangeness heightened to the point of quaint- ness, which is an element in the attractiveness of character not less than, as Bacon declared, in beautiful things. Elia is a name of the im- agination but it was borne by an old acquaint- ; ance, an Italian who was a fellow-clerk at the South-Sea House when Lamb was a boy there, INTRODUCTION. Vlii thirty years before he sat down to write these Essays and, as a piece of pleasantry, he bor- ; rowed his friend's true face to mask his own in. 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 in- ; cident 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, unknow- ; ingly 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 humourist in life's various crowd. The form which Lamb chose for himself, the familiar essay as it had been developed in Eng- land, was as well fitted to him as his natural INTRODUCTION. ix voice. He had begun as a poet, but he lacked the condensation, thedirectnessand singleness of intellectual aim, the power of control, which are essential to the poet; he was an observer of the world without, a rambler in all things, and tended inevitably to that dissipation of the eye among the multitude of men and things, which ends in prose even as ahumourist he loses him- ; self in his impressions, and becomes reportorial. But he had an eye for oddities, and with it went the saving grace that he loved the absurd in man. The spiritofcaricature was not in him. He lived in a nation marked by freedom of caprice, and in its chiefcity; but it is seldom that he chooses his subject from among thosewhose eccentricity is self-assertive the absurdities that amuse him ; arethose of nature's making, "the fool" whom he loves; and the peculiarities that arrest him are oftenest those which result from the misfor- tunes, the rubs and dents, all the rude buffeting of life leaving its marks on the form and mind ofthose who are submitted to its rule. How fre- quentlyhis characters are the broken "hulks" of thevoyage ! in what author is old age so dreary, or the boon companion so shabby! for Lamb's X INTRODUCTION. humour seldom ends in the laughable, but is a plea for toleration, sympathy, forgiveness, the old phrase of the prayer-book, miserable sinners are weall, but, principally, small sinners in small things. I cannot free myself from the feeling that, as ahumourist, Lamb is the father-confessor of venial offences, tender to waifs and cripples, the refuge of the victims ofmean misery. It is as if the Good Samaritan should turn humourist. Yet he leaves an impression that is ill-rendered by such a description, because he blends so many strands of human nature with this main thread. The charm of these Essays is personal, and it is made a mastering one by the autobiography they contain. Lamb was not less an egotist than a humourist, and in the familiar essay ego- tism has unimpeded way. He discloses his tastes and habits, and disguises not those things in which he differs from conventional man; he is proud of them, and goes his own pace. There is infinite amusement in a certain kind of self-gossip, seen to its perfection in Pepys; and though Lamb's likings in meat and drink are not to be confounded with things of the Pepys-