Charles Lamb is entitled to a place as an essayist beside Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele and Addison. He unites many of the characteristics of each of these writers—refined and exquisite humour, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry and heart-touching pathos. His fancy is distinguished by great delicacy and tenderness ; and even his conceits are imbued with human feeling and passion. He had an extreme and almost exclusive partiality for earlier prose writers, particularly for Fuller, Browne and Burton, as well as for the dramatists of Shakespeare's time; and the care with which he studied them is apparent in all he ever wrote. It shines out conspicuously in his style, which has an antique air and is redolent of the peculiarities of the 17th century. Its quaintness has subjected the author to the charge of affecta tion, but there is nothing really affected in his writings. His style is not so much an imitation as a reflection of the older writers'; for in spirit he made himself their contemporary. A confirmed habit of studying them in preference to modern literature had made something of their style natural to him ; and long experience had rendered it not only easy and familiar but habitual. It was not a masquerade dress he wore, but the costume which showed the man to most advantage. With thought and meaning often pro found, though clothed in simple language, every sentence of his essays is pregnant.
He played a considerable part in reviving the dramatic writers of the Shakespearian age, for he preceded Gifford and others in wiping the dust of ages from their works. In his brief comments on each specimen he displays exquisite powers of discrimination : his discernment of the true meaning of his author is almost infallible.
His work was a departure in criticism. Former editors had sup plied textual criticism and alternative readings: Lamb's object was to show how our ancestors felt when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations, in the conflicts of duty or passion or the strife of contending duties; what sorts of loves and enmities theirs were.
As a poet Lamb is not entitled to so high a place as that which can be claimed for him as essayist and critic. His dependence on Elizabethan models here also is manifest, but in such a way as to bring into all the greater prominence his native deficiency in "the accomplishment of verse." Yet it is impossible, once having read, ever to forget the tenderness and grace of such poems as "Hester," "The Old Familiar Faces," and the lines "On an infant dying as soon as born" or the quaint humour of "A Farewell to Tobacco." As a letter writer Lamb ranks very high, and when in his frequent nonsensical mood there is none to touch him. (A. AI., E. V. L.) See T. N. Talfourd, Charles Lamb's Letters (1837), Final Memo rials of Charles Lamb (1848) ; Barry Cornwall, Charles Lamb, A Memoir (1866) ; P. FitzGerald, Charles Lamb, his Haunts, his Friends and his Books (i866) ; Life, Letters and Writings of Charles Lamb (the Life by Talfourd, 6 vols., 1895; later ed. 5924) ; W. Carew Hazlitt, Mary and Charles Lamb (1874) ; A. Ainger, Charles Lamb (1882) ; J. C. Thomson, Bibliography of the Writings of Charles and Mary Lamb (1908) ; E. V. Lucas, Life of Charles Lamb (1921); G. E. Wherry, Cambridge and Charles Lamb (1925). Editions of Lamb's works are numerous, among them those of Canon Ainger, W. Macdonald and E. V. Lucas.