Just as the essay form is a kind of test of appreciation, so certain writers are touchstones by which the taste of the reader may be judged. One such touchstone is Charles Lamb, the prince of English essayists. Whoever likes Lamb with unfeigned enthusiasm has passed the frontier of reading and is at home in the universe of books. The reader who hopes to care for the best in Lamb will not do well, I think, to begin with the most familiar of his essays “A Dissertation on Roast Pig”; certainly he will not stop with that, for it has not Elia’s finest smile nor even his jolliest fooling. And of course it has not his wisdom and pathos. The young reader can in an hour read a half dozen of Lamb’s essays, “Old China,” “The Superannuated Man,” “Dream Children,” “Imperfect Sympathies,” “The Sanity of True Genius” and “A Chapter on Ears,” and get a taste of his sweet variety. Lamb is one of the easiest of writers to read entire. His attempts at fiction and even his verse may be disregarded. The true Lamb, the Lamb of the essays and the letters, which are as good as essays, can be contained in a couple of volumes of moderate size. The essays of Elia are printed in many cheap editions; I have seen a book seller’s counter stacked high with copies at twenty-five cents. As late as 1864, the editor of the first complete edition of Lamb thought that the public at large knew him but little, though his fame and popularity had increased since his death. I believe that since 1864 his popularity has increased still more--those twenty-five cent editions seem to show that in his own phrase, he has become “endenizened” in the heart of the English-speaking nations.