CHARLES BY LAMB. THOMAS CRADDOCK. LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, & CO., 4, STATIONERS' HALL COURT. LIVERPOOL: JAMES WOOLLARD, 54, CASTLE STREET. 1867. 20417.110 HARVARD Papier fund LIVERPOOL: WILLIAM DAWBARN & CO. (PRIVATE PRINTING OFFICE.) PREFACE. WE have probably now received all that is material towards forming a judgment on the life and character of Charles Lamb. We may continue to obtain short anecdotes and reminiscences from some of his old companions, who are still alive; but, when we consider, that the youngest of these companions are now old men, we can hardly expect that any really new impress will be given to the impression of his life and character, already formed. He has been dead more than thirty years, and such a period commonly exhausts all that is valuable in the recollections of the associates of an important man, and all that is worth publishing of his remains. We are often supplied, immediately on the death of a favorite author or statesman, with all that industrious admirers can scrape together. Reminiscences, Letters, Journals, Diaries are sometimes expanded over a dozen volumes, so that it becomes a task to read, and a task to digest what you have read. This, however, is not the case with Lamb. He wrote little, and what he did write was published before his death. He was too humble to practice the vanity, which is always more or less present in Diary writers. He never kept letters or manuscripts that fell into his hands. Thus, in his case, there was little material for the biographer, except what he could collect of Lamb's letters from his various correspondents. But he had a host of admirers, who have, in a variety of forms, published their opinions and recollections of him; and these opinions and recollections, together with his letters, are the material out of which we are enabled to form our estimate of the man.. The first of these in importance is Talfourd's life and letters of his friend, which were published in two divisions; the first, two years after Lamb's death; and the second, seven years after the first. But this work is clumsy in its construction, since it goes twice over the same ground, corrects in the second portion. what it mis-stated in the first, gives us mutilations of the correspondence; and altogether dissatisfies a reader, who wishes to see the man as he was, not as his biographer thinks he ought to be. Still this is the book whence we must always seek the most authentic image of Lamb. When the mutilated letters are restored, we shall not need much to complete our ideas of their author from them alone. The next writer who has given us the clearest notion of Lamb is Patmore. his "My Friends and Acquaintance," he enters on many important details; and, as is his wont, gives an elaborate description of In |