"Charles Lamb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen.' It was included in the folio of Beaumont and Fletcher of 1679. On grounds alike of aesthetic criticism and metrical tests, a substantial portion of the play was assigned to Shakespeare by Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Dyce. The last included it in his edition of Shakespeare. Coleridge detected Shakespeare's hand in act I., act II. sc. i., and act III. sc. i. and ii. In addition to those scenes, act IV. sc. iii. and act V. (except sc. ii.) ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... to be found in its water, nor in its bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... him two or three selections obediently, but without enthusiasm. Were they from Herrick and Charles Lamb? I rather ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... has long been known as the poor man's friend; whilst as for pork, apart from all other considerations, I can claim for it a distinct place in English literature. A greater essayist by far than the critic to whom I am referring, a certain Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House, has left us an immortal page on the origin of roast pig and crackling. And, when everything is considered, I should much like to know why novels should be confined to the aspirations of the soul, and why they should ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... the late Bishop of Lincoln's 'Memoirs' of his uncle, in 'The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson', in the 'Memorials of Coleorton' and my own 'Life' of the Poet, in the 'Prose Works', in the 'Transactions of the Wordsworth Society', in the 'Letters of Charles Lamb', in the 'Memorials of Thomas De Quincey', and other volumes; but many more, both of Wordsworth's and his sister's, have never before seen the light. More than a hundred and fifty letters from Dorothy Wordsworth to Mrs. Clarkson, ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth - Volume 1 of 8 • Edited by William Knight
... Charles Lamb, "always excite curiosity. No one ever lays one down without a feeling of disappointment." That was true a hundred years ago, and appears to be ...
— If You Don't Write Fiction • Charles Phelps Cushing
... is true. I know, too, another thing, and that is, that there will be times when you will feel tired-headed and wish you could rest. Did you ever read about Charles Lamb? You know what beautiful things Charles Lamb wrote. Some of you have read the jolly story of how roast pig was discovered by the young Chinaman. You have read that, and if you ever want a good laugh some time get the essays of Elia and turn to the paper on roast pig, and read it, and ...
— Silver Links • Various
... Loiterer's Harvest One Day and Another Fireside and Sunshine Character and Comedy Old Lamps for New The Hambledon Men The Open Road The Friendly Town Her Infinite Variety Good Company The Gentlest Art The Second Post A Little of Everything Harvest Home Variety Lane The Best of Lamb The Life of Charles Lamb A Swan and Her Friends London Revisited A Wanderer in Venice A Wanderer in Paris A Wanderer in London A Wanderer in Holland A Wanderer in Florence The British School Highways and Byways in Sussex Anne's Terrible Good Nature The Slowcoach Remember ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... dearly loved argument for its own sake that he did not always consider it necessary to weigh the accurate truth of his words. He liked to take different views of the same subject. On more than one occasion in Cedric's hearing he had compared himself with Charles Lamb. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Scott's regime were Lamb's Essays of Elia. Those charming productions, now ranked among our dearly treasured classics, were not received at first with universal approbation. The long and justly forgotten Alaric A. Watts said of them: "Charles Lamb delivers himself with infinite pain and labour of a silly piece of trifling, every month, in this Magazine, under the signature of Elia. It is the curse of the Cockney School that, with all their desire to appear exceedingly off-hand and ready with all they have to say, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... combination with the historical elements of our apologetic. It is exposed, therefore, to a damaging fire not only from unspiritualist psychology and pathology but also from the side of scholastic dogma. It is hard to admit on equal terms a partner to the old undivided rule of books and learning. With Charles Lamb, we cry in some distress, "must knowledge come to me, if it come at all, by some awkward experiment of intuition, and no longer by this familiar process of reading?"[220] and we are answered that the old process has an imperishable value, only we have not yet ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... beauty of style and diction, passionate earnestness, effective contrasts, distinctness of plot, unity, and completeness, this novel is without a rival. It is a "midnight darling" that Charles Lamb would have exulted in, and perhaps the best as yet produced from a ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... people he met, but it is impossible to believe that he ever passed such inhuman judgments on the least desirable of his new acquaintances as his friend Carlyle has left as a bitter legacy behind him. Carlyle's merciless discourse about Coleridge and Charles Lamb, and Swinburne's carnivorous lines, which take a barbarous vengeance on him for his offence, are on the level of political rhetoric rather than of scholarly criticism or characterization. Emerson never forgot that he was dealing with human beings. He could not have long endured ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Emerson, and all great individualists protect us from bad definitions, and especially from rigid or formal ones! Bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them, ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... seemed to Boswell (ante, under March 22, 1776) to be a low man, dull and untaught. 'One of the old man's miseries,' he wrote, (post, Feb. 3, 1778), 'is that he cannot easily find a companion able to partake with him of the past.' 'I have none to call me Charley now,' wrote Charles Lamb on the death of a friend of his boyhood (Talfourd's Lamb, ed. 1865, p. 145). Such a companion Johnson found in Taylor. That, on the death of his wife, he at once sent for him, not even waiting for the light of ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 3 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... is, I'm rather fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord—he, a mere man of letters!—but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... children will, almost unconsciously, to form some estimate of his father's character. And a very queer study in human nature that must have been, giving Dickens, when once he had mastered it, a most exceptional insight into the ways of impecuniosity. Charles Lamb, as we all remember, divided mankind into two races, the mighty race of the borrowers, and the mean race of the lenders; and expatiated, with a whimsical and charming eloquence, upon the greatness of one Bigod, who had been as a king among ...
— Life of Charles Dickens • Frank Marzials
... whether to print these poems in their true order as they were first published—in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, 1796; in Charles Lloyd's ems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, 1796; in Coleridge's Poems, second edition, 1797; in Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798; and in John Woodvil, 1802—with all their early readings; or whether to disregard chronological sequence, and wait until the time of the Works—1818—had come, and print them all together then. I decided, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... succession of impossible small boys and meeting in the hall the lady who had bought of him, in the morning, a set of Crabbe, largely, he flattered himself, under the artful persuasion of his acute remarks on that author, gracefully associated by him, in this colloquy, he remembered, with a glance at Charles Lamb as well, and who went off in a day or two without settling, though he received her cheque from London three or four ...
— The Finer Grain • Henry James
... with definitions and classifications, however, this distinction between wit and humor does not exactly represent the actual fact. Like all other species, Wit and Humor overlap and blend with each other. There are bon mots, like many of Charles Lamb's, which are a sort of facetious hybrids, we hardly know whether to call them witty or humorous; there are rather lengthy descriptions or narratives, which, like Voltaire's "Micromegas," would be more humorous if they were not so sparkling and antithetic, so pregnant with suggestion and satire, ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... to be found writing so, so anxious to prove I understand the laws of the game, when that game is only 'Thimble-rig' and for prizes of gingerbread-nuts—Prize or no prize, Mr. Dilke does shift the pea, and so did from the beginning—as Charles Lamb's pleasant sobriquet (Mr. Bilk, he would have it) testifies. Still he behaved kindly to that poor ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... unpicturesque as you might perhaps imagine. A strange horror of that lonely mountain graveyard came over me as I watched the little company wending wearily up to the solitary spot. The "sweet habitude of being"—not that I fear death, but that I love life as, for instance, Charles Lamb loved it—makes me particularly affect a cheerful burial-place. I know that it is dreadfully unsentimental, but I should like to make my last home in the heart of a crowded city, or, better still, in one of those ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... humanity and practising the opposite qualities, while Crabbe was looked upon as one of the foremost of living poets. Wordsworth was then forty, Sir Walter Scott forty-one, Coleridge forty-two, Walter Savage Landor and Charles Lamb each in his forty-fifth year. Byron was four-and-twenty, Shelley not yet quite of age, two radically different men, Keats and Carlyle, both youths of seventeen. Abroad, Laplace was in his maturity, with fifteen years more yet to live; Joubert with twelve; Goethe, with twenty; ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... alluding to this circumstance of the promotion of the Scottish Bard to be "a gauger of ale-firkins," in a poetical epistle to his friend Charles Lamb, calls upon him in a burst of heartfelt indignation, to gather a wreath ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... in 1784, and died at Torquay in December, 1862, at the age of 78. His father was a teacher of elocution, who compiled a dictionary, and who was related to the Sheridans. He moved to London when his son was eight years old, and there became acquainted with William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb. The son, after his school education, obtained a commission in the army, but gave up everything for the stage, and made his first appearance at the Crow Street Theatre, in Dublin. He did not become a great actor, and when he took to writing plays he did ...
— The Hunchback • James Sheridan Knowles
... and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they are examples of what may be found in ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... remember Charles Lamb's essay on distant correspondents? Well, I was somewhat of his way of thinking about my mild productions. I did not indeed imagine they were read, and (I suppose I may say) enjoyed right round upon the other ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... consult books in the library; Le Grice, the translator of "Longus;" Horne, author of some well-known productions in controversial divinity; Surr, the novelist (not in the Grammar school); James White, the friend of Charles Lamb, and not unworthy of him, author of "Falstaff's Letters" (this was he who used to give an anniversary dinner to the chimney-sweepers, merrier than, though not so magnificent as Mrs. Montague's); Pitman, a celebrated preacher, editor of ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... preciseness in literature and welcomes an idealism as wholesome as that of Miss Lagerloef. Furthermore, the Swedish authoress attracts her readers by a diction unique unto herself, as singular as the English sentences of Charles Lamb. Her style may be described as prose rhapsody held in restraint, at times passionately ...
— Jerusalem • Selma Lagerlof
... Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these noms de guerre have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall here attempt to discriminate their several styles and ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... life. Coleridge and Wordsworth began to attract attention toward the last of this period, and to be much read by those who loved the poetry of thought and the poetry of nature; while, early in the next reign, Charles Lamb published his delightful "Essays ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... are superficial, the resemblances deep and many. The hermit is a hermit, and the poet a poet, whether he grow up in the town or the country. I was forcibly reminded of this fact recently on opening the works of Charles Lamb after I had been reading those of our Henry Thoreau. Lamb cared nothing for nature, Thoreau for little else. One was as attached to the city and the life of the street and tavern as the other to the country and the life of animals ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... of St. John Street, Clerkenwell), and when the man cried to the boys—'Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?' then would he go in and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays." In one of his most delightful papers, Charles Lamb has described his first visit to a theatre. He "was not past six years old, and the play was 'Artaxerxes!' I had dabbled a little in the 'Universal History'—the ancient part of it—and here was the Court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... idea that they were human souls; he cast them out; he forgot them; and if he could not forget them he caricatured them. He was too emotional to regard them as anything but enemies, if they were not friends. He was too humane not to hate them. Charles Lamb said with his inimitable sleek pungency that he could read all the books there were; he excluded books that obviously were not books, as cookery books, chessboards bound so as to look like books, and all the works of modern historians and philosophers. ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... of Charles Lamb's quaint tender "Old familiar faces," as full of melancholy pathos as human eyes brimming with unshed tears; and from it her thoughts gradually drifted to another poem, which she had first heard from Mr. Lindsay during the week of his departure, and later from ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... out, in Pocket form, Prince Dorus, by CHARLES LAMB, with nine coloured illustrations, following the original Edition of 1811. The lines are not very Lamb-like, but the illustrations are very quaint, and the Pocket Volume ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 11, 1890 • Various
... drags upon conversation, and may produce awkward effects. It is told of Charles Lamb, that he was one day at dinner at a friend's house, where amongst a number of literary men was a solitary individual who had been invited for no apparent reason. The poor man thought that, being ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... read the almost childlike expressions of Lanier. One feels often that the worship of what he calls his "sweet masters" is overdone, and that he praises far too highly some obscure sonneteer; but there is in his work the spirit of the romantic critic — the zest of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt for the old masters. Lowell, speaking of a period in his own life when he was delivering his early lectures at Lowell Institute, said: "Then I was at the period in life when thoughts rose in covies, . . . a period of ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... Hardy Dante Goethe Walter Pater Shakespeare Matthew Arnold Dostoievsky El Greco Shelley Edgar Allan Poe Milton Keats Walt Whitman Charles Lamb Nietzsche Conclusion ...
— Women and War Work • Helen Fraser
... afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... confined by that disastrous knowledge of good and evil which is commonly understood to have resulted from the eating of forbidden fruit, and which among prudish people goes by the name of modesty. It was refreshing. Charles Lamb himself would have enjoyed it, and, I should hope, would have added some qualifying footnotes to a certain unamiable essay of his concerning the behavior ...
— A Florida Sketch-Book • Bradford Torrey
... poetical imagination his unrivalled colloquial eloquence, and his superior critical powers was born in Devonshire, England, October 20, 1772, and died July 25, 1834. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, London, where he had Charles Lamb for a school-fellow, and at Jesus' College, Cambridge. He afterwards acquired a knowledge of the German language and literature at Ratzburg and Gottingen, In early life he was a Unitarian and a Jacobin, but he subsequently became a Trinitarian and a Royalist. Those who ...
— The American Union Speaker • John D. Philbrick
... Charles Lamb, if he had been clerically disposed, would, I am sure, have written short sermons; and I think that his hearers would have carried away the gist ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... Not at all: no such discovery as "breakfast" had then been made: breakfast was not invented for many centuries after that. We have always admired, and always shall admire, as the very best of all human stories, Charles Lamb's account of the origin of roast pig in China. Ching Ping, it seems, had suffered his father's house to be burned down; the outhouses were burned along with the house; and in one of these the pigs, by accident, were roasted to a turn. Memorable ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... for lessening the misery of the world and for protecting even the sparrow from falling. It will cultivate precisely that side of human nature which stands most in need of development. To emphasize these points, Charles Lamb said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Whittier wrote of Woolman's Journal, which he edited and made easily accessible, "I have been awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene and ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... of Brighton are many and various. Charles Lamb lived for some years is Sussex House, Ship Street. Paston House was the home of William Black before he removed to Rottingdean. Ainsworth produced a goodly portion of his historical novels at No. 5, Arundel Terrace, and at 4 Percival Terrace, Herbert Spencer spent the last years of his life ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Brahms sent Joachim with the score of his second "Serenade": "Care for the piece a little, dear friend; it is very much yours and sounds of you. Whence comes it, anyway, that music sounds so friendly, if it is not the doing of the one or two people whom one loves as I love you?" The impressionable Charles Lamb must have had many such partners besides his sister Mary. Hazlitt wrote: "He is one of those of whom it may be said, 'Tell me your company, and I'll tell you your manners.' He is the creature of sympathy, and makes good whatever opinion you seem to ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... Castle;' Lord Byron issued his tragedy of 'Marino Faliero;' Southey, his 'Vision of Judgment;' Shelley, his 'Prometheus,' and Wordsworth a new edition of his poems. Besides these giants in the field of literature, numerous stars of the second and third magnitude sent forth their light. Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Barry Cornwall, Tom Moore, Allan Cunningham, Leigh Hunt, and others, were busy writing and publishing, and John Keats sent his swan-song from the tombs of the Eternal City. In the midst of this galaxy of genius and fame, John Clare stood, ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... of witchcraft confute themselves, as may be seen in all the trials for that offence. Upon this subject I would say with my old friend Charles Lamb— ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... of English snobs. With Jonathan Swift as a guide he travels with Gulliver into no-man's land and visits Lilliput or Brobdingnag; or Oliver Goldsmith enables him to forget the strenuous life of America by taking him to "The Deserted Village." He joins Charles Lamb's friends, listens to the prose-poet's reveries on Dream-Children, then closes his eyes and falls into a reverie of his own childhood days; or he spends an hour with Tennyson, charmed by his always musical but not often virile ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... of the most charming of his Essays, Charles Lamb has said, "I have seen him diffuse a glow of sentiment which has made the pulse of a crowded house beat like that of one man; when he has come in aid of the pulpit, doing good to the moral heart of a people." The words, applied thus emphatically to ...
— Charles Dickens as a Reader • Charles Kent
... a cheap form at 6s. 6d. a hundred. When the Jacobin day came, the State was really in a fright: people thought twice before they published what would now be quite disregarded. I examined a quantity of letters addressed to George Dyer[401] (Charles Lamb's G.D.) and what between the autographs of Thelwall, Hardy, Horne Tooke, and all the rebels,[402] put together a packet which produced five guineas, or thereabouts, for the widow. Among them were the following verses, sent by the author—who would not put his name, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... with it, and on the whole there are good grounds for suspecting foul play. But it is interesting to note that most Europeans who have made the acquaintance of high Lamas speak in praise of their character and intelligence. So Manning (the friend of Charles Lamb) of the ninth Grand Lama (1811), Bogle of the Tashi Lama about 1778, Sven Hedin of his successor in 1907, and Waddell of the Lama Regent ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot
... His father, who was vicar of the parish, and master of the grammar-school, died when the boy was only nine years of age. He was educated at Christ's Hospital, in London, where his most famous schoolfellow was Charles Lamb; and from there he went to Jesus College, Cambridge. In 1793 he had fallen into debt at College; and, in despair, left Cambridge, and enlisted in the 15th Light Dragoons, under the name of Silas ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... himself some new beauty—to experience some new vague and tranquil sensation that has before evaded him. It is not the people who "have pined and hungered after nature many a year, in the great city pent," as Coleridge said in the poem that made Charles Lamb so much ashamed of himself; it is not those who make the greatest progress in this intimacy with her, or who are most quick to see and have the greatest gusto to enjoy. In this, as in everything else, it ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. XXII (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... chiefly retrospective: he writes more in the spirit of the last age than of the present. Indeed, he seems too much inclined to ignore the value of our later literature; almost the only modern authors whom he quotes are Hallam, Charles Lamb, and Southey; and it is evident, both from the style and matter of the work, that the range of his reading has been most extensive in what he terms the 'classical criticism and biography of the eighteenth century.' This, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 433 - Volume 17, New Series, April 17, 1852 • Various
... of Charles Greville's, which I have just replied to, and have unfolded your last and do the same by it, i.e. answer and burn it, the yellow silk cord that bound that ominous bundle of obligations lies empty on the inkstand, and I feel like Charles Lamb escaping from his India House clerkship, a perfect lord, or ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... degree, and plunged into London. There, for a time, he was lost to public sight. But I know that he went through the usual contest. Rejected manuscripts poured back into his room. Polite, but unaccommodating Editors, found that they had no use for vapid imitations of ADDISON, or feeble parodies of CHARLES LAMB. Literary appreciations, that were to have sent the ball of fame spinning up the hill of criticism, grew frowsy and dog's-eared with many ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, Sep. 24, 1892 • Various
... Hardly could I go to bed for longing to look at them and to try them on for I know not how many times. By the wide hearth of stone or brick, one could whittle with impunity. Dirt is not common dirt in front of an open fire. Charles Lamb's clean hearth or that of the too fastidious modern house robs it of half its comfort and attractiveness. A little matter out of place, somebody's definition of dirt, is one of the most hospitable and cordial things I ever ...
— Confessions of Boyhood • John Albee
... That ever clothed itself with flower-sweet fame, Or linked itself with loftiest names of old By right and might of loving; I, that am Less than the least of those within thy fold, Give only thanks for them to thee, Charles Lamb. ...
— Sonnets, and Sonnets on English Dramatic Poets (1590-1650) • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... too paltry to quote; and the stanzas which make up the poem contain allusions to the more trivial of the early "Lyrical Ballads" (Betty Foy, Harry Gill, etc.). Wordsworth's 'Peter Bell' was published about a week later; and Shelley afterwards published his 'Peter Bell the Third'. Charles Lamb wrote to ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. II. • William Wordsworth
... shops where I most often prowl. There is in London a district around Charing Cross Road where almost every shop has books for sale. There is a continuous rack along the sidewalk, each title beckoning for your attention. You recall the class of street-readers of whom Charles Lamb wrote—"poor gentry, who, not having wherewithal to buy or hire a book, filch a little learning at the open stalls." It was on some such street that these folk practiced their innocent larceny. If one shopkeeper frowned at the diligence with which they read "Clarissa," they would continue ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Mary Lamb has long been familiar to the readers of Elia, but never in its entirety as in the monograph which Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has just contributed to the Famous Women Series. Darkly hinted at by Talfourd in his Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, it became better known as the years went on and that imperfect work was followed by fuller and franker biographies,—became so well known, in fact, that no one could recall the memory of Lamb without recalling at the ...
— Elizabeth Fry • Mrs. E. R. Pitman
... Philip's father grew cool in the negotiation, and Philip himself was perfectly passive. Yet when a few years afterwards the lady vas married to Lord Rich, who abused her, Sidney loved her, and wrote the sonnets to Stella, which are his best poetry, and which Charles Lamb so ...
— Literary and Social Essays • George William Curtis
... as a matter of fact, with or without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really care for literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are relatively few. If we could procure a completely confidential statement of the number of persons to whom the names of Charles Lamb and Gainsborough have a distinct meaning, and still more of those who can summon up an impression of the essays of the one and of the pictures of the other, we should in all probability be painfully startled. ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... I have often heard him say, he was first taken to the theatre at the very tenderest age. He could hardly, however, have been younger than Charles Lamb, whose first experience was of having seen Artaxerxes when six years old; and certainly not younger than Walter Scott, who was only four when he saw As You Like It on the Bath stage, and remembered having screamed ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the reason why he has been so much praised for his style. When we say of a new thing that it "has style," we mean that it is done as we have seen things done before. Bunyan, De Foe, or Charles Lamb were to their contemporaries men without style. The English, to this day, complain of Emerson that he has ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... years.... Would I could sell you some of my leisure! Positively the best thing a man can do is—Nothing; and next to that, perhaps, Good Works." Two years—two long and tedious years passed; and Charles Lamb's feelings had undergone an entire change. He now discovered that official, even humdrum work—"the appointed round, the daily task"—had been good for him, though he knew it not. Time had formerly been his friend; ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... The biography of CHARLES LAMB lies within a narrow compass. It comprehends only few events. His birth and parentage, and domestic sorrows; his acquaintance with remarkable men; his thoughts and habits; and his migrations from one home to another,—constitute ...
— Charles Lamb • Barry Cornwall
... will be very welcome to thousands of admirers and lovers of Charles Lamb. The verses are certainly far superior to most of the poems written ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... weeks; and it is a wonder that his marvellous mind retained its freshness at all after the poison had passed from amid the delicate tissues of the brain. He conquered himself at last; but I fear that his health was impaired by his few mad outbursts. Charles Lamb, who is dear to us all, reduced himself to a pitiable state by giving way to outbreaks of alcoholic craving. When Carlyle saw him, the unhappy essayist was semi-imbecile from the effects of drink; and the savage Scotsman wrote some cruel words which will unfortunately cleave to Lamb's cherished ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... to amateurs. To contrast a few names, taken at random, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Tennyson, and Carlyle were professionals, it is true; but, on the other hand, Milton, Gray, Boswell, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Browning, and Ruskin were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes or publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which a man writes. Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life, and for the noblest ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... would have done well to yield to the 'call' he had in his youth; teachers were positive that he would have made an inspiring teacher. No one, so far as I know, ever told him that in becoming a book-collector he had deprived the world of a great musician; for he was like Charles Lamb in that he was sentimentally inclined to harmony but ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... an eagerness ludicrously at variance with the difference of their respective situations. It seemed—as Charles Lamb said of humorous letters to distant lands—as though eagerness must grow so stale before it reached the summit of this ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... all their cattish gestures plainly spoke They thought the affair they'd come upon no joke." CHARLES LAMB. ...
— The Tapestry Room - A Child's Romance • Mrs. Molesworth
... the opening doors, troubled him with a sense of shame. To be sure, he was in the spiritual company of Charles Lamb, and of many another man of brains who has waited under the lamp. But contact with the pittites of Kingsmill offended his instincts; he resented this appearance of inferiority to people who came at their leisure, and took seats in the better parts of the house. When a neighbour addressed ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... all respect to Charles Lamb, to be paralleled by a score of other jewels from the reckless work ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... beefsteak and pint of port from the "plump head-waiter at the Cock;" did not disdain the pit of the theatre; and for a supper a homely refection at the tavern. How delightful are the suppers in Charles Lamb to read of even now!—the cards—the punch—the candles to be snuffed—the social oysters—the modest cheer! Whoever snuffs a candle now? What man has a domestic supper whose dinner-hour is eight o'clock? Those little meetings, in the memory of many of us yet, are gone quite away into the past. ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... try to linger out pleasures they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some cigars. They rushed out ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... practice of arriving late at one's desk, but departing from it early, can only abate, but not take away. The passage has been often quoted in which Chaucer half implies a feeling of the kind, and tells how he sought recreation from what Charles Lamb would have called his "works" at the Custom House in the reading, as we know he did in the writing, of ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by an unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories. Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers more scrupulous, tradesmen ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... that they had no alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the schoolroom, and the street, we have usually resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb, who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early in the afternoon, we have first, half educated women, and then, to restore the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been placed in their ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... watching the steam rattle the cover of a teapot and from it getting the rudimentary idea of the steam engine is another case in point. Sometimes however the application of the hints of nature to the needs of man is rather ludicrously indirect. Charles Lamb gravely averred that because an early Chinaman discovered that the flesh of a pet pig, accidentally roasted in the destruction by fire of his owner's house, proved delicious to the palate, the Chinese for years ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... reading with Charles Lamb. I choose Lamb for various reasons: He is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements are simple and very short. Moreover, he may usefully lead to other and more complex matters, as will ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... Puritanism of the preceding age, and in part to the outspeaking frankness which disdained hypocrisy. It is shown in Dryden, Pope, Prior, of the last of whom Johnson said that no lady objected to have his poems in her library; still more in the dramatists of that time, whom Charles Lamb has so humorously defended, and in the plays of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who, as Pope says, "fairly puts all characters to bed." But whatever coarseness there may be in some of Swift's poems, such as "The Lady's Dressing Room," and a few other pieces, there is nothing licentious, ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift
... good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows what is not. A little representative collection of the ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... B[oe]otian, and died at the sixth number. Many of the fugitive pieces of these early days were collected in volumes now exceedingly rare: "December Tales" (London, 1823), which is not wholly from his pen; the "Works of Cheviot Tichburn" (London, 1822; Manchester, 1825), dedicated to Charles Lamb; and "A ...
— Rookwood • William Harrison Ainsworth
... amusing; may continue to write the most delightful of stories and essays—consider Jane Austen and our own Miss Repplier—over which appreciative readers may continue to chuckle; Englishmen may continue, as in the past to produce the most exquisite of the world's humorous literature—think of Charles Lamb—yet the fundamental faith of mankind will remain unshaken: women have no sense of humor, and an Englishman cannot see a joke! And the ability to "see a joke" is the infallible American test of the sense ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
... Lincoln's Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel now stands, and not far from the spot which was destined to witness the terrible tragedy which was at once to darken and glorify the life of one of Milton's most fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About this time he is supposed to have abandoned pedagogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to him; indeed, it is one seldom thrown off. It is much easier to throw off ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a native of New Jersey, whose Travels and Autobiography have been much admired abroad, notably by Charles Lamb.] ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin
... [Footnote 1: Mr. Charles Lamb, now passing his declining years quietly on his farm, a dozen miles from Springfield, Illinois, was a compositor on the "Sangamo Journal" from 1836 to 1843, and it was he who put into type the poem ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... which the soul is connected with humanity," says Simms. "The beings who appear cold," says Madame Swetchine, "adore where they dare to love." "Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved," says Charles Lamb. "It is possible," says Terence, referring to the unquestionable temporary insanity of the passion, "that a man can be so changed by love that one could not recognize him to be the same person." "Solid love, whose root is virtue, can no more die, than virtue itself," says Erasmus, who was ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... war against Britain, which was thus left to contend singly against the power of France. Party feeling running very high, the anti-Jacobins were by no means discriminating in their attacks, associating men together who really had nothing in common. Hence the reader is surprised to find Charles Lamb and other non-intruders into politics, figuring as congenial conspirators with Tom Paine. Fox, Sheridan, Erskine, and other eloquent liberals of the day, with Tierney, Home Tooke, and Coleridge were at ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... of a beginning, Page asked him what was his favourite character in fiction. She spoke of the beauty of Ruskin's thoughts, of the gracefulness of Charles Lamb's style. The conversation lagged a little. Landry, not to be behind her, declared for the modern novel, and spoke of the "newest book." But Page never read new books; she was not interested, and their talk, unable to establish itself upon a common ground, ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... did not tell the exact truth, and Violet's despairing face lightens. Marcia may have Charles Lamb's way of thinking the truth too precious to be wasted upon everybody, for she is sometimes extremely ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... the same everywhere. Burr made friends and devoted allies among all sorts of men. During his stay in France, England, Germany, and Sweden he interested such men as Charles Lamb, Jeremy Bentham, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Heeren. They found his mind able to meet with theirs on equal terms. Burr, indeed, had graduated as a youth with honors from Princeton, and had continued ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood.... What a woman should demand is respect for her as she is a woman. Let her first lesson be, with sweet Susan Winstanley, to reverence her sex." CHARLES LAMB: Essays of Elia. ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... 'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a view to their being acted at the Globe, ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... Christ. His was a force mightier than intellect. Wherever he moved a light ne'er seen on land nor sea shone on man. It was more than eminent beauty or supreme genius. His scepter was not through cunning of brain or craft of hand; reality was his throne. "Therefore," said Charles Lamb, "if Shakespeare should enter the room we should rise and greet him uncovered, but kneeling meet the Nazarene." His gift cannot be bought nor commanded; but his secret and charm may be ours. Acceptance, obedience, companionship ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... formerly been managed by Henry Sass, but, in Butler's time, was being carried on by Francis Stephen Cary, son of the Rev. Henry Francis Cary, who had been a school-fellow of Dr. Butler at Rugby, and is well known as the translator of Dante and the friend of Charles Lamb. Among his fellow- students was Mr. H. R. Robertson, who told me that the young artists got hold of the legend, which is in some of the books about Lamb, that when Francis Stephen Cary was a boy and there was a talk at his father's house as ...
— Samuel Butler: A Sketch • Henry Festing Jones
... able to walk in and say his say there, fearing no man; it was like a huge mirror that reflected his own independence. Yet no one ever said harder or fiercer things of his own fellow-craftsmen. His description of Charles Lamb as "a pitiful rickety, gasping, staggering, stammering tom-fool" is not an amiable one! Or take his account of Wordsworth- -how instead of a hand-shake, the poet intrusted him with "a handful of numb unresponsive fingers," ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... things about the other. Their antipathy is rooted partly in temperament, partly in history, and partly in that ignorance and lack of understanding which accounts for nine-tenths of all international antipathies. As Charles Lamb said, in an anecdote which President Wilson is fond of quoting, "I cannot hate a man I know." It is sometimes said that the French and the Italians are too much alike to be in perfect sympathy. The Frenchman has at times an instinct ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the mastery, and the Louis who never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained in statu quo, and was so only to be judged. It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely celebrated—only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only sympathy can secure. If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... like this funeral dirge," says Charles Lamb, "except the ditty which reminds Ferdinand of his drowned father in the Tempest. As that is of the water, watery; so this is of the earth, earthy. Both have that intenseness of feeling, which seems to resolve itself into the element which ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... disturbed by any occurrence, the sight or quiet voice of a Quaker acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking off a load from the bosom; but I cannot like the Quakers, as Desdemona would say, "to live with them."—Charles Lamb. ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... editions that have been published both in England and America is legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces, although of late years there have been no new issues. Even in 1802, Charles Lamb ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent vixen, a beautiful and queenly ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... things who could sit under a sofa, and so they remained up and heard the poet read his poem. The treat was never afterwards forgotten, and one cannot over-estimate such pleasures in forming the character of a child. Nor were such the only intellectual delights the children shared in, for Charles Lamb was among Godwin's numerous friends at this period, and a frequent visitor at his house; and we can still hear in imagination the merry laughter of children, old and young, whom he gathered about him, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... April 20, 1764, and March 20, 1778. Charles Lamb in a note to his Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare says of Davies, that he 'is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... metropolis. It would appear that these grinders of music, with some few exceptions which we shall notice as we proceed, are distinguished from their praiseworthy exemplars, the musicians, by one remarkable, and to them perhaps very comfortable characteristic. Like the exquisite Charles Lamb—if his curious confession was not a literary myth—they have ears, but no ear, though they would hardly be brought to acknowledge the fact so candidly as he did. They may be divided, so far as our observation goes, into the following ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... Mr. Hazlitt calls it, "though an imperfect and unequal performance, Marlowe's greatest work." Mr. Hallam remarks,—"There is an awful melancholy about Marlowe's Mephistopheles, perhaps more impressive than the malignant mirth of that fiend in the renowned work of Goethe." Charles Lamb even preferred Marlowe's "Faustus," as a whole, to the latter! Mr. Collier calls it "a drama of power, novelty, interest, and variety." So, indeed, it is; but all that power, interest, novelty, and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various
... knows ten times more about this matter and about all the professions, as he does about everything else, than I do. My opinion is that he has studied two, if not three, of these professions in a regular course. I don't know that he has ever preached, except as Charles Lamb said Coleridge always did, for when he gets the bit in his teeth he runs away with the conversation, and if he only took a text his talk would be a sermon; but if he has not preached, he has made a study ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... more ready and willing to recognize his own failures than Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was what might be expected ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Charles Lamb made the most pithy criticism of Spenser when he called him the poets' poet. We may fairly leave the allegory on one side, for perhaps, after all, he adopted it only for the reason that it was in fashion, and put it on as he did his ruff, not because it was becoming, ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... been threatened with demolition for a number of years, the famous Winchmore Hill Woods are at last to be hewn down and the land is to be built upon. These woods, which it was Hood's and Charles Lamb's delight to stroll in, have become the property of a syndicate, which will issue a prospectus shortly, and many of the fine old oaks, beeches, and elms already bear the splash of white which marks them for the axe. ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... Cowper." Query, Who first designated the "Task" thus? Charles Lamb uses the phrase as a quotation. (See Final Memorials of ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various |
