that reputation as a conversationalist or inspirer of conversation in others, which Hazlitt, who was at one time one of Lamb’s closest friends, has done so much to celebrate. When in 1818 appeared the Works in two volumes, it may be that Lamb considered his literary career over. Before coming to 1820, and an event which was in reality to be the beginning of that career as it is generally known—the establishment of the London Magazine—it should be recorded that in the summer of 1819 Lamb, with his sister’s full consent, proposed marriage to Fanny Kelly, the actress, who was then in her thirtieth year. Miss Kelly could not accept, giving as one reason her devotion to her mother. Lamb bore the rebuff with characteristic humour and fortitude.
The establishment of the London Magazine in 1820 stimulated Lamb to the production of a series of new essays (the Essays of Elia) which may be said to form the chief corner-stone in the small but classic temple of his fame. The first of these, as it fell out, was a description of the old South Sea House, with which Lamb happened to have associated the name of a “gay light-hearted foreigner” called Elia, who was a clerk in the days of his service there. The pseudonym adopted on this occasion was retained for the subsequent contributions, which appeared collectively in a volume of essays called Elia, in 1823. After a career of five years the London Magazine came to an end; and about the same period Lamb’s long connexion with the India House terminated, a pension of £450 (£441 net) having been assigned to him. The increased leisure, however, for which he had long sighed, did not prove favourable to literary production, which henceforth was limited to a few trifling contributions to the New Monthly and other serials, and the excavation of gems from the mass of dramatic literature bequeathed to the British Museum by David Garrick, which Lamb laboriously read through in 1827, an occupation which supplied him for a time with the regular hours of work he missed so much. The malady of his sister, which continued to increase with ever shortening intervals of relief, broke in painfully on his lettered ease and comfort; and it is unfortunately impossible to ignore the deteriorating effects of an over-free indulgence in the use of alcohol, and, in early life, tobacco, on a temperament such as his. His removal on account of his sister to the quiet of the country at Enfield, by tending to withdraw him from the stimulating society of the large circle of literary friends who had helped to make his weekly or monthly “at homes” so remarkable, doubtless also tended to intensify his listlessness and helplessness. One of the brightest elements in the closing years of his life was the friendship and companionship of Emma Isola, whom he and his sister had adopted, and whose marriage in 1833 to Edward Moxon, the publisher, though a source of unselfish joy to Lamb, left him more than ever alone. While living at Edmonton, whither he had moved in 1833 so that his sister might have the continual care of Mr and Mrs Walden, who were accustomed to patients of weak intellect, Lamb was overtaken by an attack of erysipelas brought on by an accidental fall as he was walking on the London road. After a few days’ illness he died on the 27th of December, 1834. The sudden death of one so widely known, admired and beloved, fell on the public as well as on his own attached circle with all the poignancy of a personal calamity and a private grief. His memory wanted no tribute that affection could bestow, and Wordsworth commemorated in simple and solemn verse the genius, virtues and fraternal devotion of his early friend.
Charles Lamb is entitled to a place as an essayist beside Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Steele and Addison. He unites many of the characteristics of each of these writers—refined and exquisite humour, a genuine and cordial vein of pleasantry and heart-touching pathos. His fancy is distinguished by great delicacy and tenderness; and even his conceits are imbued with human feeling and passion. He had an extreme and almost exclusive partiality for earlier prose writers, particularly for Fuller, Browne and Burton, as well as for the dramatists of Shakespeare’s time; and the care with which he studied them is apparent in all he ever wrote. It shines out conspicuously in his style, which has an antique air and is redolent of the peculiarities of the 17th century. Its quaintness has subjected the author to the charge of affectation, but there is nothing really affected in his writings. His style is not so much an imitation as a reflexion of the older writers; for in spirit he made himself their contemporary. A confirmed habit of studying them in preference to modern literature had made something of their style natural to him; and long experience had rendered it not only easy and familiar but habitual. It was not a masquerade dress he wore, but the costume which showed the man to most advantage. With thought and meaning often profound, though clothed in simple language, every sentence of his essays is pregnant.
He played a considerable part in reviving the dramatic writers of the Shakesperian age; for he preceded Gifford and others in wiping the dust of ages from their works. In his brief comments on each specimen he displays exquisite powers of discrimination: his discernment of the true meaning of his author is almost infallible. His work was a departure in criticism. Former editors had supplied textual criticism and alternative readings: Lamb’s object was to show how our ancestors felt when they placed themselves by the power of imagination in trying situations, in the conflicts of duty or passion or the strife of contending duties; what sorts of loves and enmities theirs were.
As a poet Lamb is not entitled to so high a place as that which can be claimed for him as essayist and critic. His dependence on Elizabethan models is here also manifest, but in such a way as to bring into all the greater prominence his native deficiency in “the accomplishment of verse.” Yet it is impossible, once having read, ever to forget the tenderness and grace of such poems as “Hester,” “The Old Familiar Faces,” and the lines “On an infant dying as soon as born” or the quaint humour of “A Farewell to Tobacco.” As a letter writer Lamb ranks very high, and when in a nonsensical mood there is none to touch him.
Editions and memoirs of Lamb are numerous. The Letters, with a sketch of his life by Sir Thomas Noon Talfourd, appeared in 1837; the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb by the same hand, after Mary Lamb’s death, in 1848; Barry Cornwall’s Charles Lamb: A Memoir, in 1866. Mr P. Fitzgerald’s Charles Lamb: his Friends, his Haunts and his Books (1866); W. Carew Hazlitt’s Mary and Charles Lamb (1874). Mr Fitzgerald and Mr Hazlitt have also both edited the Letters, and Mr Fitzgerald brought Talfourd to date with an edition of Lamb’s works in 1870–1876. Later and fuller editions are those of Canon Ainger in 12 volumes, Mr Macdonald in 12 volumes and Mr E. V. Lucas in 7 volumes, to which in 1905 was added The Life of Charles Lamb, in 2 volumes. (E. V. L.)
LAMB (a word common to Teutonic languages; cf. Ger. Lamm),
the young of sheep. The Paschal Lamb or Agnus Dei is used as a
symbol of Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God (John i. 29), and
“lamb,” like “flock,” is often used figuratively of the members
of a Christian church or community, with an allusion to Jesus’
charge to Peter (John xxi. 15). The “lamb and flag” is an
heraldic emblem, the dexter fore-leg of the lamb supporting a
staff bearing a banner charged with the St George’s cross. This
was one of the crests of the Knights Templars, used on seals as
early as 1241; it was adopted as a badge or crest by the Middle
Temple, the Inner Temple using another crest of the Templars,
the winged horse or Pegasus. The old Tangier regiment, now
the Queen’s Royal West Surrey Regiment, bore a Paschal Lamb
as its badge. From their colonel, Percy Kirke (q.v.), they were
known as Kirke’s Lambs. The exaggerated reputation of the
regiment for brutality, both in Tangier and in England after
Sedgmoor, lent irony to the nickname.
LAMBALLE, MARIE THÉRÈSE LOUISE OF SAVOY-CARIGNANO,
Princesse de (1749–1792), fourth daughter of
Louis Victor of Carignano (d. 1774) (great-grandfather of King
Charles Albert of Sardinia), and of Christine Henriette of Hesse-Rheinfels-Rothenburg,
was born at Turin on the 8th of September
1749. In 1767 she was married to Louis Alexandre Stanislaus de
Bourbon, prince of Lamballe, son of the duke of Penthièvre, a
grandson of Louis XIV.’s natural son the count of Toulouse. Her
husband dying the following year, she retired with her father-in-law
to Rambouillet, where she lived until the marriage of the
