case at present, and Lamb
undertook the entire charge of her. She repaid him by unfailing care and
affection during her lucid intervals (which were long and frequent), and
by a sympathy with his own literary tastes, which not seldom made her a
valuable collaborator as well as sympathiser. But the shadow was on his
whole life: it made it impossible for him to marry, as he evidently
would have done if it had not existed; and it perhaps had something to
do with a venial but actual tendency on his part to take, rather fully,
the convivial license of the time. But Lamb had no other weakness, and
had not this in any ruinous degree. The quality of his genius was
unique. He had from the first been a diligent and affectionate student
of sixteenth and seventeenth century writers, and some of his first
literary efforts, after some early sonnets (written with Coleridge and
their friend Lloyd, and much fallen foul of by the Tory wits of the
_Anti-Jacobin_), were connected with these studies. He and his sister
wrote _Tales from Shakespeare_, which, almost alone of such things, are
not unworthy of the original. He executed an Elizabethan tragedy, _John
Woodvil_, which is rather better than it has been generally said to be;
and he arranged a series (or rather two) of scenes from the Elizabethan
drama itself, the short, interspersed, critical remarks of which, though
occasionally a very little fanciful, contain the most exquisitely
sympathetic criticism to be found anywhere in English literature.

It was not, however, till he had well reached middle age that the
establishment of the _London_, the later publishers of which, Taylor and
Hessey, were his friends, gave him that half accidental, and yet it
would seem necessary, opening which has so often made the fame of men of
genius, and which apparently they are by no means often able to make for
themselves. Lamb's poems have occasionally an exquisite pathos and more
frequently a pleasant humour, but they would not by themselves justify a
very high estimate of him; and it is at least possible that, if we had
nothing but the brief critical remarks on the dramatists above noticed,
they would, independently of their extreme brevity, have failed to
obtain for him the just reputation which they now hold, thanks partly to
the fact that we have, as comments on them, the _Essays of Elia_ and the
delightful correspondence. This latter, after being first published soon
after Lamb's death in 1834 (ni