Perhaps the beginner will be a little perplexed at first by the obscurity of Lamb’s allusions to literature, for though he says that he could “read almost anything,” he has a special liking for the quaint, and half the books that he mentions will be unfamiliar to the modern reader. But any book that pleased him will be worth looking at, and there is so much of common humanity in him that one can pass over his obscure references and still understand and enjoy him. So that if I recommend as the best possible short guide to literature his “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading,” I do not forget that the beginner will not recognize all the book titles and authors that Lamb touches with affectionate familiarity. Yet the thoughts are clear enough and have more of the true spirit of reading packed into them than is to be found in many a thick volume of literary criticism. The essays that touch the heart of the simplest reader, such as “Dream Children,” may be read first, and they will lead to the literary essays, which are the best of all criticisms in the English language. Knowledge of Lamb is knowledge of literature. He opens the way not only to the choicest old books, but to the finest of his contemporaries. No man knew better than he the value of those friends of his whom we have set high in literature; he measured their altitude while they were swinging into place among the poetic stars. As the chief master of literary ceremonies of his time, Lamb will be found at his best not only in his essays but in his letters. His essays have the informality of letters, and his letters have much of the choiceness of phrase, the original turn of thought that distinguish his essays. In his friendly letters you can meet almost everybody worth knowing in that great period of English literature. Lamb is among the fine few whose correspondence is a work of literary art. The literature of private letters stands somewhere between essays and biography and partakes of the interest of both. The good letter writer is as rare in printed books as in the mail bags that are now hurrying over the world; and the delight of reading good printed letters by a distinguished man is somewhat like the delight of reading a well-written letter from a friend. To be sure, a book of letters is not a masterwork of art, but it often brings pleasure when the reader is not just in mood for the artistic masterpiece, for the great poem or novel. I can recommend for a place in a library even of very limited dimensions such a collection of letters as Mr. E. V. Lucas’s “The Gentlest Art,” or Scoones’s “English Letters.”