le 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.

Robert Louis Stevenson is justly regarded as the greatest essayist of
our time, but I would not exchange the _Essays of Elia_ for the best
things of the author of _Virginibus Puerisque_. Stevenson always,
except in his familiar early letters, suggests the literary artist who
has revised his first draft, with an eye fixed on the world of readers
who will follow him when he is gone. But Lamb always wrote with that
charming spontaneous grace that comes from a mind saturated with the
best reading and mellow with much thought. You fancy him jotting down
his thoughts, with his quizzical smile at the effect of his quips and
cranks. You cannot figure him as laboriously searching for the right
word or painfully recasting the same sentence many times until he
reached the form which suited his finical taste. This was Stevenson's
method, and it leaves much of his work with the smell of the lamp upon
it. Lamb apparently wrote for the mere pleasure of putting his
thoughts in form, just as he talked when his stammering tongue had
been eased with a little good old wine.

It is idle to expect another Lamb in our strenuous modern life, so we
should make the most of this quaint Englishman of the early part of
the last century, who seemed to bring over into an artificial age all
the dewy freshness of fancy of the old Elizabethan worthies. Can
anything be more perfect in its pathos than his essay on "Dream
Children," the tender fancy of a bachelor whom hard fate robbed of the
domestic joys that would have made life beautiful for him? Can
anything be more full of fun than his "Dissertation on Roast Pig," or
his "Mrs. Battle's Opinion on Whist"? His style fitted his thought
like a glove; about it is the aroma of an earlier age when men and
women opened their hearts like children. Lamb lays a spell upon us
such as no other writer can work; he plays upon the strings of our
hearts, now surprising us into wholesome laughter, now melti