As an Essayist, Charles Lamb will be remembered, in years to come, with Rabelais and Montaigne, with Sir Thomas Browne, with Steele, and with Addison. He unites many of the finest characteristics of these several writers. He has wisdom and wit of the highest order, exquisite humor, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry, and the most heart-touching pathos. In the largest acceptation of the word he is a humanist. No one of the great family of authors past or present has shown in matters the most important or the most trivial so delicate and extreme a sense of all that is human. It is the prevalence of this characteristic in his writings which has subjected him to occasional charges of want of imagination. This, however, is but half-criticism; for the matter of reproach may in fact be said to be his triumph. It was with a deep relish of Mr. Lamb's faculty that a friend of his once said, "He makes the majesties of imagination seem familiar." It is precisely thus with his own imagination. It eludes the observation of the ordinary reader in the modesty of its truth, in its social and familiar air. His fancy as an Essayist is distinguished by singular delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits will generally be found to be, as those of his favorite Fuller often are, steeped in human feeling and passion. The fondness he entertained for Fuller, for the author of the "Anatomy of Melancholy," and for other writers of that class, was a pure matter of temperament. His thoughts were always his own. Even when his words seem cast in the very mould of others, the perfect originality of his thinking is felt and acknowledged; we may add, in its superior wisdom, manliness, and unaffected sweetness. Every sentence in those Essays may be proved to be crammed full of thinking. The two volumes will be multiplied, we have no doubt, in the course of a few years, into as many hundreds; for they contain a stock of matter which must be ever suggestive to more active minds, and will surely revisit the world in new shapes--an everlasting succession and variety of ideas. The past to him was not mere dry antiquity; it involved a most extensive and touching association of feelings and thoughts, reminding him of what we have been and may be, and seeming to afford a surer ground for resting on than the things which are here to-day and may be gone to-morrow. We know of no inquisition more curious, no speculation more lofty, than may be found in the Essays of Charles Lamb. We know no place where conventional absurdities receive so little quarter; where stale evasions are so plainly exposed; where the barriers between names and things are at times so completely flung down. And how, indeed, could it be otherwise? For it is truth that plays upon his writings like a genial and divine atmosphere. No need for them to prove what they would be at by any formal or logical analysis; no need for him to tell the world that this institution is wrong