I love Charles Lamb and his writings so much, that I think everybody else ought to love them. There is not great weight in those essays of his; you cannot learn from them what the capital of Hindostan is, or what Buddhism is, nor the date of the capture of Constantinople. Measured by {320} the Dry-as-Dust standard, and there is scarce more in them than in a field of daisies, over which the sunshine and the summer breezes are at play. But what delicacy there is! what a tender humor; what gentle and regaling lapses of quaint thought that beguiles and invites and is soothing and never wearies. Lamb's poems are not of the best; they have a haltingness--like that in his speech,--with none of Rogers's glibness and currency, and none of his shallowness either. Constraint of rhyme sat on Elia no easier than a dress-coat. But in prose he was all at home; it purled from his pen like a river. It was quaint, kindly, utterly true--with little yaws of humor in it, filling his sails of a sudden, and stirring you to smiling outbreak--then falling away and leaving him to a gently undulating forward movement which charms by its quietude, serenities, and cheerfulness. There was not much in his life to tell you of; no cannon firing, no drum beats, no moving splendors. A thin, kindly face he had, and thin figure too; in dark or grayish clothes ordinarily, that a clerk might wear; threadbare perhaps at the {321} elbows; not a presentable man amongst swell people; never aspiring to be;--as distinct indeed as a brown hermit-thrush amongst chattering parrots. He has a stammer, too, as I have hinted, in his voice, which may annoy but never makes this quiet man ashamed; in fact, he deploys that stammering habit so as to allow of coy advance, and opportunity for pouncing with tremulous iteration upon his little jokelets, in a way to double their execution; he put it to service, too, in some of his tenderer stories, so as to make, by his very hesitancies, an added and most touching pathos. He was of humble origin, his father a servitor about Temple Courts--only long gunshot away from Newgate Street; and when the son--through with his Christ Hospital schooling--came to have a small stipend (first, from the South Sea House and later from the East India Company), he had his little family--the only one that ever belonged to Charles Lamb--all about him in his lodgings in Little Queen Street. There was Mary, his sister, ten years older; his poor, bedridden mother, and his father, lapsing into dotage and only happy with cribbage-board at his elbow, and {322} Charles or other good friend to make count. It was this quiet household on which a thunderbolt fell one day. This is Lamb's mention of it in a letter to Coleridge:--