Lamb as an Essayist

CHARLES LAMB (1775-1834), an original and delightful English essayist and critic, was born in Crown Office Bow, Inner Temple, London, February 10, 1775. His father, John Lamb, a Lincolnshire man, who filled the situation of clerk and servant companion to Mr Salt, one of the benchers of the Inner Temple, was successful in obtaining for Charles, the youngest of three children, o presentation to Christ's Hospital, where the boy remained from his eighth to his fifteenth year (1782-1789). Here he was fortunate enough to have for a schoolfellow the afterwards famous Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his senior by rather more than two years, and a close and tender life-long friendship began which had a singularly great influence on the whole of his after career. 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 (spent, as his school holidays had often been, over old English authors in the library of Mr Salt), was condemned to the labours of the desk,—an "unconquerable impediment" in his speech disqualifying him for a school exhibition, and thus depriving him of the only means by which he could have obtained a university education. For a short time he held a clerkship in the South Sea House under his elder brother John, and in 1792 he entered the accountant's office in the East India House, where during the next three and thirty years the hundred folios of what he used to call his true "works" were produced. A dreadful calamity soon came upon him, which seemed to blight all his prospects in the very morning of life. There was insanity in the family, which in his twenty-first year had led to his own confinement for some weeks in a lunatic asylum; and, a few months afterwards, on the 22d of September 1796, his sister Mary, "worn down to a state of extreme nervous misery by attention to needlework by day and to her mother by night," was suddenly seized with acute mania, in