Barry Cornwall

“ No potent critic ever shouldered him up the hill of fame. In the absence of these old-fashioned helps, he was content that his own unassisted efforts should gain for him a certificate of capability to the world, and that the choice reputation which he thus earned should, with his own qualities, bring round him the unenvying love of a host of friends.
Lamb had always been a studious boy and a great reader; and after passing through Christ's Hospital and the South Sea House, and being for some years in the India House, this instinctive passion of his mind (for literature) broke out. ”

“ Coleridge helped to unloose his mind from too precise notions: Southey gave it consistency and correctness: Manning expanded his vision: Hazlitt gave him daring: perhaps even poor George Dyer, like some unrecognized virtue, may have kept alive and nourished the pity and tenderness which were originally sown within him. We must leave the difficulty, as we must leave the great problems of Nature, unexplained, and be content with what is self-evident before us. We know, at all events, that he had an open heart, and that the heart is a fountain which never fails. ”

“ Leigh Hunt, from temperament, was more alive to pleasant influences (sunshine, freedom for work, rural walks, complimentary words) than the others. Hazlitt cared little for these things; a fierce argument or a well-contested game at rackets was more to his taste; whilst Lamb's pleasures (except, perhaps, from his pipe) lay amongst the books of the old English writers. His soul delighted in communion with ancient generations, more especially with men who had been unjustly forgotten. Hazlitt's mind attached itself to abstract subjects; Lamb's was more practical, and embraced men. ”

“ Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence: he utterly abjures and discards them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, all the cant of criticism and helps of notoriety.
His affections revert to and settle on the past ”

“ He had more real knowledge of old English literature than any man whom I ever knew. He was not an antiquarian. He neither hunted after commas, nor scribbled notes which confounded his text. The Spirit of the author descended upon him; and he felt it! With Burton and Fuller, Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne, he was an intimate. The ancient poets—chiefly the dramatic poets—were his especial friends. He knew every point and turn of their wit, all the beauty of their characters; loving each for some one distinguishing particular, and despising none. ”

“ Even when a boy he was forced to labor for his bread. In the first opening of manhood a terrible calamity fell upon him, in magnitude fit to form the mystery or centre of an antique drama. He had to dwell, all his days, with a person incurably mad. From poverty he passed at once to unpleasant toil and perpetual fear. These were the sole changes in his fortune. Yet he gained friends, respect, a position, and great sympathy from all; showing what one poor man of genius, under grievous misfortune, may do, if he be courageous and faithful to the end. ”

“ Apart from his humor and other excellences, Charles Lamb combined qualities such as are seldom united in one person; which indeed seem not easily reconcilable with each other: namely, much prudence, with much generosity; great tenderness of heart, with a firm will. To these was superadded that racy humor which has served to distinguish him from other men. There is no other writer, that I know of, in whom tenderness, and good sense, and humor are so intimately and happily blended; no one whose view of men and things is so invariably generous, and true, and independent. ”

“ He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion; that piques and provokes his fancy most which is hid from a superficial glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view more genuine, and has given more signs that it will live, than a thing of yesterday, which may be forgotten to- morrow. Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it ”

“ But Hogarth was the greatest inventor,—the greatest discoverer of character,—in the English or any other school. As a painter of manners he is unapproached. In a kindred walk, he traversed all the passions from the lowest mirth to the profoundest melancholy, possessing the tragic element in the most eminent degree. And if grandeur can exist— as I presume it can—in beings who have neither costume nor rank to set off their qualities, then some of the characters of Hogarth in essential grandeur are far beyond the conventional figures of many other artists. ”

“ Leigh Hunt said that "he had a head worthy of Aristotle." Hazlitt calls it "a fine Titian head, full of dumb eloquence." I knew that, before he had attained the age of twenty years, he had to make his way in the world, and that his lines had not been cast in pleasant places. I had heard, indeed, that his family had at one time consisted of a father and mother and an insane sister; all helpless and poor, and all huddled together in a small lodging, scarcely large enough to admit of their moving about without restraint. It is difficult to imagine a more disheartening youth. ”

“ He did not cling to any superior intellect, nor cherish any inferior humorist or wit.
Perhaps no one ever thought more independently. He had great enjoyment in the talk of able men, so that it did not savor of form or pretension. He liked the strenuous talk of Hazlitt, who never descended to fine words. He liked the unaffected, quiet conversation of Manning, the vivacious, excursive talk of Leigh Hunt. He heard with wondering admiration the monologues of Coleridge. Perhaps he liked the simplest talk the best; expressions of pity or sympathy, or affection for others ”

“ In the foregoing desultory account of Charles Lamb I have, without doubt, set forth many things that are frequently held as trivial. Nothing, however, seems to me unimportant which serves in any way to illustrate a character. The floating straws, it is said, show from what quarter the wind is blowing. So the arching or knitting of the brow is sometimes sufficient to indicate wonder or pride, anger or contempt. On the stage, indeed, it is often the sole means of expressing the fluctuation of the passions. ”

“ We read of men giving up all their days to a single object—to religion, to vengeance, to some overpowering selfish wish; of daring acts done to avert death or disgrace, or some oppressing misfortune. We read mythical tales of friendship; but we do not recollect any instance in which a great object has been so unremittingly carried out throughout a whole life, in defiance of a thousand difficulties, and of numberless temptations, straining the good resolution to its utmost, except in the case of our poor clerk of the India House. ”

“ His reasoning always rose and streamed through the heart. He liked a friend for none of the ordinary reasons; because he was famous, or clever, or powerful, or popular. He at once took issue with the previous verdicts, and examined the matter in his own way. If a man was unfortunate, he gave him money. If he was calumniated, he accorded him sympathy. He gave freely; not to merit, but to want.
He pursued his own fancies, his own predilections. He did not neglect his own instinct (which is always true) , and aim at things foreign to his nature. ”

“ Perhaps it is sometimes scriptural: at all events it is always earnest and sincere. He was painfully in earnest in his advocacy of Hazlitt and Hunt, and in his pleadings for Hogarth and the old dramatists. Even in his humor, his fictitious (as well as his real) personages have a character of reality about them which gives them their standard value. They all ring like true coin. In conversation he loved to discuss persons or books, and seldom ventured upon the stormy sea of politics; his intimates lying on the two opposite shores, Liberal and Tory. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is not part of my task to adjust the claims of the various writers of verse in this country to their stations in the Temple of Fame. If Keats was by nature the most essentially a poet in the present century, there is little doubt that Wordsworth has left his impress more broadly and more permanently than any other of our later writers upon the literature of England. There are barren, unpeopled wastes in the "Excursion," and in some of the longer poems; but when his Genius stirs, we find ourselves in rich places which have no parallel in any book since the death of Milton. ”

“ To him who never gave pain to a human being, whose genius yielded nothing but instruction and delight, was awarded a calm and easy death. No man, it is my belief, was ever loved or lamented more sincerely than Charles Lamb. His sister (his elder by a decade) survived him for the space of thirteen years.
By strict economy, without meanness; with much unpretending hospitality; with frequent gifts and lendings, and without any borrowing,—he accumulated, during his thirty-three years of constant labor, the moderate sum of two thousand pounds. ”

“ Sometimes there was a flight of high and earnest talk, that took one half way towards the stars.
It seems great matter for regret that the thoughts of men like Lamb's associates should have passed away altogether; for scarcely any of them, save Wordsworth and Coleridge, are now distinctly remembered; and it is, perhaps, not impossible to foretell the duration of their fame. All have answered their purpose, I suppose. Each has had his turn, and has given place to a younger thinker, as the father is replaced by the son. ”

“ You have not to force up gratitude from oblivious depths, day by day, for undeserved bounty. In Lamb's case it happened, unfortunately, that the activity of mind which had procured his repose, tended afterwards to disqualify him from enjoying it. The leisure, that he had once reckoned on so much, exceeded, when it came, the pains of the old counting-house travail. It is only the imbecile, or those brought up in complete lazihood, who can encounter successfully the monotony of "nothing to do," and can slumber away their lives unharmed amongst the dumb weeds and flowers. ”

“ But it is scarcely worth while to chronicle minutely the harmless foibles of this inoffensive old man. If I had to write his epitaph, I should say that he was neither much respected nor at all hated; too good to dislike, too inactive to excite great affection; and that he was as simple as the daisy, which we think we admire, and daily tread under foot.
In 1799 Charles Lamb visited Cambridge, and there, through the introduction of Lloyd, made the important acquaintance of Mr. Thomas Manning, then a mathematical tutor in the university. This soon grew into a close intimacy. ”

“ I want a phrase to express the combination of qualities which constitutes Lamb's excellence in letters. In the absence of this, I must content myself with referring to some of the papers which live most distinctly in my recollection. I will not transcribe any part of his eulogy on Hogarth; nor of his fine survey of "Lear," that grandest of all tragedies. They are well known to students of books. I turn for a moment to the Elia Essays only. In mere variety of subject (extent in a small space) they surpass almost all other essays. They are full of a witty melancholy. ”

“ From the age of twenty-one to the age of fifty- nine, when he died, he hated fine words and flourishes of rhetoric. His imagination (not very lofty, perhaps) is to be discovered less in his verse than in his prose humor, than in his letters and essays. In these it was never trivial, but was always knit together by good sense, or softened by tenderness. Real humor seldom makes its appearance in the first literary ventures of young writers. Accordingly, symptoms of humor (which, nevertheless, were not long delayed) are not to be discovered in Charles Lamb's first letters or poems ”

“ Of the Essays of "Elia," [1] written originally for the London Magazine, I feel it difficult to speak. They are the best amongst the good—his best. I see that they are genial, delicate, terse, full of thought and full of humor; that they are delightfully personal; and when he speaks of himself you cannot hear too much; that they are not imitations, but adoptions. ”

“ It is true that in his essays and numerous letters many of his sincere thoughts and opinions are written down. These, however, are written down simply, and just as they occur, without any special design. Some persons exhibit only their ingenuity, or learning. It is not every one who is able, like the licentiate Pedro Garcias, to deposit his wealth of soul by the road-side.
Like all persons of great intellectual sensibility, Lamb responded to all impressions. To sympathize with Tragedy or Comedy only, argues a limited capacity. ”