lks smile and stare, but the
ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will
prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as
you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same
liberty with my puns [underlined].

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of
all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a
farce for Saturday night. Pray give them a place on your
shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have
duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your
welcome presents--

I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for
August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs.
The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look
about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters,
boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The
four [crossed out] fore quarters are not so good. She may
let them hop off by themselves. Yours sincerely, Cha^s
Lamb.

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them;
for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick."
Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt
stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to
literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within
a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia,
than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."

The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is
perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant
note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high
truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most
delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity
of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the
same--if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing
Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author
figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station,"
whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but in the case of Lamb
and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know
something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it
abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not
happen to be acquaint