THE BEST BELOVED OF ALL THE ENGLISH WRITERS--QUAINTEST AND TENDEREST ESSAYIST WHOSE WORK APPEALS TO ALL HEARTS. Of all the English writers of the last century none is so well beloved as Charles Lamb. Thirty years ago his _Essays of Elia_ was a book which every one with any claim to culture had not only read, but read many times. It was the traveling companion and the familiar friend, the unfailing resource in periods of depression, the comforter in time of trouble. It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears. Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture. [Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM HAZLITT] Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother, _Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor to Lamb. Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy of his fancy. Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always, except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had been eased with a little good old wine.