ld be dated,
And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton mated.

Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he
addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With
the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the
references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew
Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The
Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in
his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as
occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression.
As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the
past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less
in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that
writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is
perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it.
"For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few
English writers who have written so differently on different themes."
Placing special emphasis on his favourites--which besides the three
named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of
the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance--it may
be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of
our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style,
though it must be remembered--it cannot be forgotten with a volume of
his essays or letters in hand--that there is always that marked but
indescribable "individuality of manner" which pervades the varied
whole.

Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the
essay in which he--not very felicitously--brackets Elia and Geoffrey
Crayon in the "Spirit of the Age," says:

He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no
glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither
fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of
new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though
it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed
through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court
popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from
every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the
retirement of his own mind.

That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the
best of English lit