It touched many experiences of life, and it ranged from
sunny, spontaneous humor to that pathos which is too deep for tears.
Into it Lamb put all that was rarest and best in his nature, all that
he had gleaned from a life of self-sacrifice and spiritual culture.
[Illustration: CHARLES LAMB FROM THE PORTRAIT BY WILLIAM
HAZLITT]
Such men as he were rare in his day, and not understood by the
literary men of harder nature who criticised his peculiarities and
failed to appreciate the delicacy of his genius. Only one such has
appeared in our time--he who has given us a look into his heart in _A
Window in Thrums_ and in that beautiful tribute to his mother,
_Margaret Ogilvie_. Barrie, in his insight into the mind of a child
and in his freakish fancy that seems brought over from the world of
fairyland to lend its glamour to prosaic life, is the only successor
to Lamb.
Lamb can endure this neglect, for were he able to revisit this earth
no one would touch more whimsically than he upon the fads and the
foibles of contemporary life; but it's a great pity that in the
popular craze about the new writers, all redolent with the varnish of
novelty, we should consign to the dust of unused shelves the works of
Charles Lamb. All that he wrote which the world remembers is in Elia
and his many letters--those incomparable epistles in which he quizzed
his friends and revealed the tenderness of his nature and the delicacy
of his fancy.
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