as not to touch
popularity--it may be doubted whether he ever did that in his
lifetime. He was known, admired, loved by a large circle of friends
and acquaintances, but his work made little impression, we may
believe, upon the wider reading public; it was, however, fully
appreciated by those of his contemporaries best able to judge, and
"Elia" came to be recognized as one of the literary mainstays of a
magazine which counted among its contributors, De Quincey, Allan
Cunningham, B. W. Procter, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Horace
Smith, and many more writers of note in their day.

Little more than six months after Lamb's first essay signed "Elia" had
appeared in the "London," the editor of that magazine was wounded in a
duel and died, and in the summer of 1821 the periodical changed hands,
but retained its brilliant staff of contributors, and acquired the
services of Thomas Hood, then a young man of two-and-twenty, as a
"sort of sub-editor." The new proprietors gave monthly dinners to
their writers, and here Lamb would meet some of his old friends and
many new. Hood has recorded his first meeting with Elia in the offices
of the magazine, and his account may be quoted, affording as it does
something like a glimpse of Lamb in his habit as he lived at the time
of the full maturity of his powers:

I was sitting one morning beside our Editor, busily
correcting proofs, when a visitor was announced, whose name,
grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice, like Tom Pipes
calling from the hold through the hatchway, did not resound
distinctly on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in
came a stranger,--a figure remarkable at a glance, with a
fine head, on a small spare body, supported by two almost
immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables, of a bygone
fashion, but there was something wanting, or something
present about him, that certified he was neither a divine,
nor a physician, nor a school master: from a certain
neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate
bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume
would be anomalous, for a _Quaker_ in black. He looked still
more like (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a
New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once
with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he
advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was
plantigra