The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4Lamb, Charles
General
The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4
Lamb, Charles
English essays; English poetry; Short stories, English
As his works are now scarcely perused but by antiquaries, I thought
it might not be unacceptable to my readers to present them with some
specimens of his manner, in single thoughts and phrases; and in some
few passages of greater length, chiefly of a narrative description. I
shall arrange them as I casually find them in my book of extracts,
without being solicitous to specify the particular work from which
they are taken.
_Pyramids_.--"The Pyramids themselves, doting with age, have
forgotten the names of their founders."
_Virtue in a Short Person_.--"His soul had but a short diocese to
visit, and therefore might the better attend the effectual informing
thereof."
_Intellect in a very Tall One_.--"Ofttimes such who are built four
stories high, are observed to have little in their cockloft."
_Naturals_.--"Their heads sometimes so little, that there is no room
for wit; sometimes so long, that there is no wit for so much room."
_Negroes_.--"The image of God cut in ebony."
_School-Divinity_.--"At the first it will be as welcome to thee as a
prison, and their very solutions will seem knots unto thee."
_Mr. Perkins the Divine_.--"He had a capacious head, with angles
winding and roomy enough to lodge all controversial intricacies."
_The same_.--"He would pronounce the word _Damn_ with such an
emphasis as left a doleful echo in his auditors' ears a good while
after."
_Judges in Capital Cases_.--"O let him take heed how he strikes that
hath a dead hand."
_Memory_.--"Philosophers place it in the rear of the head, and it
seems the mine of memory lies there, because there men naturally dig
for it, scratching it when they are at a loss."
_Fancy_.--"It is the most boundless and restless faculty of the soul;
for while the Understanding and the Will are kept, as it were, _in
libera custodia_ to their objects of _verum et bonum_, the Fancy is
free from all engagements: it digs without spade, sails without ship,
flies without wings, builds without charges, fights without
bloodshed; in a moment striding from the centre to the circumference
of the world; by a kind of omnipotency creating and annihilating
things in an instant; and things divorced in Nature are married in
Fancy as in a lawless place."
_Infants_.--"Some, admiring what motives to mirth infants meet with
in their silent and solitary smiles, have resolved, how truly I know
not, that then they converse with angels; as indeed such cannot among
mortals find any fitter companions."
_Music_.--"Such is the sociableness of music, it conforms itself to
all companies both in mirth and mourning; complying to improve that
passion with which it finds the auditors most affected. In a word, it
is an invention which might have beseemed a son of Seth to have been
the father thereof: though better it was that Cain's great-grandchild
should have the credit first to find it, than the world the
unhappiness longer to have wanted it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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