Faguet, Lemaître, &c., and in the more substantive work of Ch. de
Pomairols, Lamartine (1889); E. Deschanel, Lamartine (1893);
E. Zyrowski, Lamartine (1896); and perhaps best of all in the
Preface to Emile Legouis’ Clarendon Press edition of Jocelyn (1906),
where a vigorous effort is made to combat the idea of Lamartine’s
sentimentality and femininity as a poet. (G. Sa.)
LAMB, CHARLES (1775–1834), English essayist and critic, was born in Crown Office Row, Inner Temple, London, on the
10th of February 1775. His father, John Lamb, a Lincolnshire
man, who filled the situation of clerk and servant-companion
to Samuel Salt, a member of parliament and one of the benchers
of the Inner Temple, was successful in obtaining for Charles,
the youngest of three surviving children, a presentation to
Christ’s Hospital, where the boy remained from his eighth to
his fifteenth year (1782–1789). Here he had for a schoolfellow
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his senior by rather more than two
years, and a close and tender friendship began which lasted for
the rest of the lives of both. When the time came for leaving
school, where he had learned some Greek and acquired considerable
facility in Latin composition, Lamb, after a brief stay at
home (probably spent, as his school holidays had often been,
over old English authors in Salt’s library) was condemned to the
labours of the desk—“an inconquerable impediment” in his
speech disqualifying him for the clerical profession, which, as
the school exhibitions were usually only given to those preparing
for the church, thus deprived him of the only means by which
he could have obtained a university education. For a short
time he was in the office of Joseph Paice, a London merchant,
and then for twenty-three weeks, until the 8th of February 1792,
he held a small post in the Examiner’s Office of the South Sea
House, where his brother John was established, a period which,
although his age was but sixteen, was to provide him nearly
thirty years later with materials for the first of the Essays of Elia.
On the 5th of April 1792, he entered the Accountant’s
Office in the East India House, where during the next three and
thirty years the hundred official folios of what he used to call
his true “works” were produced.
Of the years 1792–1795 we know little. At the end of 1794 he saw much of Coleridge and joined him in writing sonnets in the Morning Post, addressed to eminent persons: early in 1795 he met Southey and was much in the company of James White, whom he probably helped in the composition of the Original Letters of Sir John Falstaff; and at the end of the year for a short time he became so unhinged mentally as to necessitate confinement in an asylum. The cause, it is probable, was an unsuccessful love affair with Ann Simmons, the Hertfordshire maiden to whom his first sonnets are addressed, whom he would have seen when on his visits as a youth to Blakesware House, near Widford, the country home of the Plumer family, of which Lamb’s grandmother, Mary Field, was for many years, until her death in 1792, sole custodian.
It was in the late summer of 1796 that a dreadful calamity came upon the Lambs, which seemed to blight all Lamb’s prospects in the very morning of life. On the 22nd of September his sister Mary, “worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother at night,” was suddenly seized with acute mania, in which she stabbed her mother to the heart. The calm self-mastery and loving self-renunciation which Charles Lamb, by constitution excitable, nervous and self-mistrustful, displayed at this crisis in his own history and in that of those nearest him, will ever give him an imperishable claim to the reverence and affection of all who are capable of appreciating the heroisms of common life. With the help of friends he succeeded in obtaining his sister’s release from the life-long restraint to which she would otherwise have been doomed, on the express condition that he himself should undertake the responsibility for her safe keeping. It proved no light charge: for though no one was capable of affording a more intelligent or affectionate companionship than Mary Lamb during her periods of health, there was ever present the apprehension of the recurrence of her malady; and when from time to time the premonitory symptoms had become unmistakable, there was no alternative but her removal, which took place in quietness and tears. How deeply the whole course of Lamb’s domestic life must have been affected by his singular loyalty as a brother needs not to be pointed out.
Lamb’s first appearance as an author was made in the year of the great tragedy of his life (1796), when there were published in the volume of Poems on Various Subjects by Coleridge four sonnets by “Mr Charles Lamb of the India House.” In the following year he contributed, with Charles Lloyd, a pupil of Coleridge, some pieces in blank verse to the second edition of Coleridge’s Poems. In 1797 his short summer holiday was spent with Coleridge at Nether Stowey, where he met the Wordsworths, William and Dorothy, and established a friendship with both which only his own death terminated. In 1798, under the influence of Henry Mackenzie’s novel Julie de Roubigné, he published a short and pathetic prose tale entitled Rosamund Gray, in which it is possible to trace beneath disguised conditions references to the misfortunes of the author’s own family, and many personal touches; and in the same year he joined Lloyd in a volume of Blank Verse, to which Lamb contributed poems occasioned by the death of his mother and his aunt Sarah Lamb, among them being his best-known lyric, “The Old Familiar Faces.” In this year, 1798, he achieved the unexpected publicity of an attack by the Anti-Jacobin upon him as an associate of Coleridge and Southey (to whose Annual Anthology he had contributed) in their Jacobin machinations. In 1799, on the death of her father, Mary Lamb came to live again with her brother, their home then being in Pentonville; but it was not until 1800 that they really settled together, their first independent joint home being at Mitre Court Buildings in the Temple, where they lived until 1809. At the end of 1801, or beginning of 1802, appeared Lamb’s first play John Woodvil, on which he set great store, a slight dramatic piece written in the style of the earlier Elizabethan period and containing some genuine poetry and happy delineation of the gentler emotions, but as a whole deficient in plot, vigour and character; it was held up to ridicule by the Edinburgh Review as a specimen of the rudest condition of the drama, a work by “a man of the age of Thespis.” The dramatic spirit, however, was not thus easily quenched in Lamb, and his next effort was a farce, Mr H——, the point of which lay in the hero’s anxiety to conceal his name “Hogsflesh”; but it did not survive the first night of its appearance at Drury Lane, in December 1806. Its author bore the failure with rare equanimity and good humour—even to joining in the hissing—and soon struck into new and more successful fields of literary exertion. Before, however, passing to these it should be mentioned that he made various efforts to earn money by journalism, partly by humorous articles, partly as dramatic critic, but chiefly as a contributor of sarcastic or funny paragraphs, “sparing neither man nor woman,” in the Morning Post, principally in 1803.
In 1807 appeared Tales founded on the Plays of Shakespeare, written by Charles and Mary Lamb, in which Charles was responsible for the tragedies and Mary for the comedies; and in 1808, Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of Shakespeare, with short but felicitous critical notes. It was this work which laid the foundation of Lamb’s reputation as a critic, for it was filled with imaginative understanding of the old playwrights, and a warm, discerning and novel appreciation of their great merits. In the same year, 1808, Mary Lamb, assisted by her brother, published Poetry for Children, and a collection of short school-girl tales under the title Mrs Leicester’s School; and to the same date belongs The Adventures of Ulysses, designed by Lamb as a companion to The Adventures of Telemachus. In 1810 began to appear Leigh Hunt’s quarterly periodical, The Reflector, in which Lamb published much (including the fine essays on the tragedies of Shakespeare and on Hogarth) that subsequently appeared in the first collective edition of his Works, which he put forth in 1818.
Between 1811, when The Reflector ceased, and 1820, he wrote almost nothing. In these years we may imagine him at his most social period, playing much whist and entertaining his friends on Wednesday or Thursday nights; meanwhile gathering
