Charles Lamb: A Memoir | Page 5

worshipped the Idol which the multitude had set
up. I was never able to prevail on him to admit that "Paradise Lost" was
greater than "Paradise Regained;" I believe, indeed, he liked the last the
best. He would not discuss the Poetry of Lord Byron or Shelley, with a
view of being convinced of their beauties. Apart from a few points like
these, his opinions must be allowed to be sound; almost always; if not
as to the style of the author, then as to the quality of his book or
passage which he chose to select. And his own style was always good,
from the beginning, in verse as well as in prose. His first sonnets are
unaffected, well sustained, and well written.
I do not know much of the opinion of others; but to my thinking the
style of Charles Lamb, in his "Elia," and in the letters written by him in
the later (the last twenty) years of his life, is full of grace; not
antiquated, but having a touch of antiquity. It is self-possessed, choice,
delicate, penetrating, his words running into the innermost sense of
things. It is not, indeed, adapted to the meanest capacity, but is racy,
and chaste, after his fashion. 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. Yet, when occasion moved him, he did not refuse to
express his liberal opinions. There was little or nothing cloudy or vague
about him; he required that there should be known ground even in
fiction. He rejected the poems of Shelley (many of them so
consummately beautiful), because they were too exclusively ideal.
Their efflorescence, he thought, was not natural. He preferred Southey's
"Don Roderick" to his "Curse of Kehama;" of which latter poem he

says, "I don't feel that firm footing in it that I do in 'Roderick.' My
imagination goes sinking and floundering in the vast spaces of
unopened systems and faiths. I am put out of the pale of my old
sympathies."
Charles Lamb had much respect for some of the modern authors. In
particular, he admired (to the full extent of his capacity for liking)
Coleridge, and Wordsworth, and Burns. But with these exceptions his
affections rested mainly on writers who had lived before him; on some
of them; for there were "things in books' clothing" from which he
turned away loathing. He was not a worshipper of the customs and
manners of old times, so much as of the tangible objects that old times
have bequeathed to us; the volumes tinged with decay, the buildings
(the Temple, Christ's Hospital, &c.) colored and enriched by the hand
of age. Apart from these, he clung to the time present; for if he hated
anything in the extreme degree, he hated change.
He clung to life, although life had bestowed upon him no magnificent
gifts; none, indeed, beyond books, and friends (a "ragged regiment"),
and an affectionate, contented mind. He had, he confesses, "an
intolerable disinclination to dying;" which beset him especially in the
winter months. "I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle.
Any alteration in this earth of mine discomposes me. My household
gods plant a terrible fixed foot, and are not rooted up without blood."
He seems never to have looked into the Future. His eyes were on the
present or (oftener) on the past. It was always thus from his boyhood.
His first readings were principally Beaumont and Fletcher, Massinger,
Isaac Walton, &c. "I gather myself up" (he writes) "unto the old
things." He has indeed extracted the beauty and innermost value of
Antiquity, whenever he has pressed it into his service.

CHAPTER II.
_Birth and Parentage.--Christ's Hospital.--South Sea House and India
House.--Condition of Family.--Death of Mother.--Mary in
Asylum.--John Lamb.--Charles's Means of Living.--His
Home.--Despondency.--Alice W.-- Brother and Sister._

On the south side of Fleet Street, near to where it adjoins Temple Bar,
lies the Inner Temple. It extends southward to the Thames, and
contains long ranges of melancholy buildings, in which lawyers (those
reputed birds of prey) and their followers congregate. It is a district
very memorable. About seven hundred years ago, it was the
abiding-place of the Knights Templars, who erected there a church,
which still uplifts its round tower (its sole relic) for the wonder of
modern