Word: lambs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...SELECTED LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB (291 pp.)-Edited by T.S Matthews-Farrar, Straus & Cudahy...
...sister and brother were Mary and Charles Lamb. Charles was a 21-year-old clerk in the offices of the East India Company-a fragile, stammering youth with a large head on a thin little body, pipestem legs, and a strained look about his eyes. As a result of a nervous breakdown he himself had spent six weeks "very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton." But confronted with the hard-and-fast alternatives of taking care of Mary or committing her to an institution, Charles never hesitated. Until death parted them, brother and sister lived together like...
Conceits & Quiddities. The strain left deep marks on the character and writings of poor Charles Lamb. He drowned his sorrows in drink, diluted his tragedy with splashes of nervous, tense humor, indulged in "conceits and quiddities" that might grate on some modern sensibilities. His letters make better reading than the essays he wrote under the name of "Elia" (anagram for "A Lie"). This selection by T. S. Matthews, onetime managing editor of TIME, is shrewdly contrived to show why Lamb was not merely pitied for his sufferings but loved as well for his goodness. Indeed, the most remarkable thing about...
...walk and talk with great men was as much an everyday thing to Lamb as rubbing shoulders with the demons of insanity. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge had written "what he calls a vision, Kubla Khan," it was to Lamb that he read this great poem aloud-"so enchantingly that it brings heaven into my parlor while he sings or says it." William Hazlitt, angriest of English essayists ("He avows that not only does he not pity sick people, but he hates them"), was another devoted friend. Percy Bysshe Shelley makes a brief appearance ("His voice was the most obnoxious squeak...
Small Change. What did Coleridge say that kept "half the Poetry of England" listening in fascination? The maddening thing about Lamb is that he never bothered to record anything that was really important. "His pockets," says Matthews, "were stuffed with smaller change," causing him to jingle the pennies of his own life in preference to hoarding the sovereigns of greater men. Life with Mary circumscribed his sense of proportion and drove him into what he called "depressions, black as a smith's beard." Praised by his friends for his courage and devotion, he only answered tersely: "I stink...