deed the work seems at first to have
been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the
telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out
of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon,
Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of
grammar, for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the
work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb
objected. His reference to tail-pieces is possibly an indication that
he sometimes rounded off the stories for his sister, just as he
certainly completed the preface for her. Though the dual authorship of
the volume is referred to in the preface the publisher put Charles
Lamb's name as author of the whole on the title-page of the book. The
"Tales" are of course designed for young readers--they are told, as it
has been recognized, with a kind of Wordsworthian simplicity--as an
introduction to "the rich treasures from which the small and valueless
coins are extracted." How admirably they have served their purpose for
generations of readers is to be seen in the long succession of
editions in which the work has been issued.

Again did brother and sister collaborate in the next of the children's
books associated with the name of Lamb, and again Charles was
responsible for but about a third of the whole. Of the ten tales in
"Mrs. Leicester's School" he wrote but three. These stories, which are
supposed to be told by young girls to their school-mates, are simple
records of childish experiences recounted with childish naivete. They
met with some success during the lifetime of their authors--ten
editions being disposed of in something under twenty years--and still
hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that
wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature,
associated with the name of Lamb. Here, as later in the "Essays of
Elia," we have recollections of the actual events of their own
childhood permeating the invented narratives and imparting a new
interest to the whole. Coleridge prophesied remarkably about this
little book, when in talking to a friend he said:

It at once soothes and amuses me to think--nay, to
know--that the time will come when this little volume of my
dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not
only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the
treasury of our permanent English literatu