In the mid-part of the period during which Charles Lamb was writing, either on his own account or in collaboration with his sister, the books for children to which reference has just been made, he was also engaged upon the work which was to bring him before the world as a great critic, as the first of the Neo-Elizabethans if I may substitute that nickname for the time-honoured one which calls him the last of the Elizabethans. For us, to-day, with our bountiful acknowledgment of all that we owe to the great body of dramatic poets who flourished during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, for us with our many collected editions of the works of these men it is somewhat difficult to realize the benighted condition in which our fellows were situated a century ago. Elizabethan drama to by far the greater number of our great grandparents meant Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone; to us Shakespeare is only the sun of a great dramatic planetary system, and the corrected view is largely owing to the efforts of one revolutionary critic, and that critic was Charles Lamb. His earliest letters show that he had revelled in this by-way of literature, and had there found much that was of the best comparatively forgotten, or at least wholly neglected, and he gladly availed himself of an opportunity afforded for selecting striking passages from the English dramatic poets. "Specimens are becoming fashionable," he wrote. "We have 'Specimens of Ancient English Poets,' 'Specimens of Modern English Poets,' 'Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,' without end. They used to be called 'Beauties'! You have seen 'Beauties of Shakspeare'? so have many people that never saw any beauties in Shakspeare." Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the unfortunate clerical forger, Dodd, in the scheme which he had in hand. When we turn to the "Specimens" themselves we discover them to be fine indeed, and in reading them and the brief but pregnant notes upon them, we marvel at the sureness of the touch and the maturity of the writer. The notes, or commentary, rarely extend beyond a score of lines, and are most often far below that, yet they are always wonderfully pertinent; there is "no philology, no antiquarianism, no discussion of difficult or corrupt passages," no pedantry in fact, or dry-as-dustism. It must not be forgotten when we look over the volume with scenes from the plays of Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley and others--it must not be forgotten that Lamb was pleading the merits of these dramatic poets before a generation to which some of them were but names and the rest practically non-existent. The suggestion which Lamb throws out in the preface that he had desired to show "how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries" is amply borne out in his brief notes upon his selections.