"Charles Lamb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... its own poet. He has been dignified by the criticism of Charles Lamb, and his accomplishment was the composing of epitaphs. "What is the reason," Lamb writes to Wordsworth in 1810, "we have ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... simply drags upon conversation, and may produce awkward effects. It is told of Charles Lamb, that he was one day at dinner at a friend's house, where amongst a number of literary men was a solitary individual who had been invited for no apparent reason. The poor man thought that, being in such company, it behoved him to talk ...
— Frost's Laws and By-Laws of American Society • Sarah Annie Frost
... unceasing industry, the cleverness of his handicraft, his unsullied integrity, sunny good-humour, and simple dignity. But, most of all, he claims my respect for the way he brings up his children. "A babe in the house is a well-spring of pleasure," is a pretty theory, but Charles Lamb reminds us that each child must stand on his own footing as an individual, and be liked or disliked accordingly. In the igloo and the tupik the child has his own accorded place and moves in and out of the home and about his occupations with that hard-to-describe ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt were great city ramblers, followed in due course by Dickens, R.L.S., Edward Lucas, Holbrook Jackson, and Pearsall Smith. Mr. Thomas Burke is another, whose "Nights in Town" will delight the lover of the greatest of all cities. But ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... of certainty—the couch (a sofa by day), the cupboard, the writing-table with its student lamp, the litter of pamphlets and old quartos and octavos in tattered bindings, among which were scarce reprints of his beloved Charles Lamb, and perhaps—nay, surely—an ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... I tell you. It answers me to be found writing so, so anxious to prove I understand the laws of the game, when that game is only 'Thimble-rig' and for prizes of gingerbread-nuts—Prize or no prize, Mr. Dilke does shift the pea, and so did from the beginning—as Charles Lamb's pleasant sobriquet (Mr. Bilk, he would have it) testifies. Still he behaved kindly to that poor Frances ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... me the critique that beats his on Pope, and on Dryden— nay, even on Milton; and hang me if you may not read his essay on Shakespeare even after having read Charles Lamb, or heard Coleridge, with increased admiration of the powers of all three, and of their insight, through different avenues, and as it might seem almost with different bodily and mental organs, into Shakespeare's ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... chairman has defined my position. I knew I was a guest, but I did not know I was an author—however, I will begin my remarks here because I think it is appropriate at an Authors' Club to quote from so able and so lovely a man as Charles Lamb. Charles Lamb has said that the world is divided into two classes, those who are born to borrow and those who are born to lend, and if you happen to be of the latter class, why, do it cheerfully. ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these noms de guerre have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall here attempt to discriminate their several styles and manner, and to point ...
— The Spirit of the Age - Contemporary Portraits • William Hazlitt
... will be very welcome to thousands of admirers and lovers of Charles Lamb. The verses are certainly far superior to most of the poems written for the ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... preceding contains the noble speech of Petronius quoted by Charles Lamb in the Specimens. In a space of twenty lines the author has concentrated a world of wisdom. One knows not whether to admire more the justness of the thought or the exquisite finish of the diction. ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... has corroborated history on many points, and backed up the gossipy Vasari in a valuable way. It is very doubtful whether either of these gentlemen had ever the felicity of reading the other's book, unless there be books in Elysium—as Charles Lamb thought there were—but sure it is that they render sidelights on the times that are much to our profit. Vasari and Cellini had been close friends in youth, working and studying together. Vasari was a poor ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... faced this peculiarly terrible crisis of domestic affairs. When the Bard himself moved back to Stratford after his years in London, what did he think about it? How did he get all his papers packed up, and did he, in mere weariness, destroy the half-done manuscripts of plays? Charles Lamb moved round London a good deal; did he never write of his experience? We like to think of Emerson: did he ever move, and if so, how did he behave when the fatal day came? Did he sit on a packing case and utter sepulchral aphorisms? Think of Lord Bacon and ...
— Pipefuls • Christopher Morley
... works of Martin. Wilkie, in a letter to Sir George Beaumont, describes Belshazzar's Feast as a "phenomenon." Bulwer declared that Martin was "more original and self-dependent than Raphael or Michael Angelo." In the Last Essays of Elia there is one by Charles Lamb entitled Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Production of Modern Art. The name of Martin is not mentioned, but several of his works are unmistakably described. "His towered architecture [Lamb is writing of Belshazzar's ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... have to learn what he has learned and is learning every day: "the joy," as Charles Lamb so aptly put it upon his retirement, "of walking about and around instead ...
— A Dutch Boy Fifty Years After • Edward Bok
... Mr. Charles Lamb, indeed, attempted to set up a defence for this way of writing. The dramatists of the latter part of the seventeenth century are not, according to him, to be tried by the standard of morality which exists, and ought to exist, in real life. Their world is a conventional ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... alone in their tribulations. Sheridan was hissed, and so were Goldsmith and Fielding and Coleridge and Godwin and Beaumarchais and About and Victor Hugo and Scribe and Sardou, and many another, including Charles Lamb, who cheerfully hissed his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... Do you remember what Charles Lamb says about roast pig? How he falls into an ecstasy of laudation, spelling the very name with small capitals, as if the lower case were too mean for such a delicacy, and breaking away from the cheap encomiums ...
— Days Off - And Other Digressions • Henry Van Dyke
... which irresistibly recalls a reminiscence of Jack the Giant-killer. The chapters on theft and trespass establish the rights of book owners as against book stealers, book borrowers, and book defacers, with an affectionate precision which would have gladdened the heart of Charles Lamb or Sir Walter Scott. ["A, being on friendly terms with Z, goes into Z's library, in Z's absence, and takes a book without Z's express consent. Here, it is probable that A may have conceived that he had Z's implied consent to use Z's books. If this was A's impression, ...
— Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay • George Otto Trevelyan
... its own sake that he did not always consider it necessary to weigh the accurate truth of his words. He liked to take different views of the same subject. On more than one occasion in Cedric's hearing he had compared himself with Charles Lamb. ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... deaf men generally dislike having their infirmity alluded to, and even endeavour to conceal it as much as possible. Charles Lamb, or some other noted wit, seeing a deaf acquaintance on the other side of the street one day while walking with a friend, stopped and motioned to him; then opened his mouth as if speaking in a loud tone, but saying not a word. "What are you bawling for?" ...
— Flowers from a Persian Garden and Other Papers • W. A. Clouston
... composed when the author was barely twenty-four years of age. Van den Brink was a leading critic of the Romanticists; Hasebrock, author of a volume of essays called "Truth and Dream," has been likened to the English Charles Lamb. Vosmaer is another eminent figure in Dutch literature; he wrote a "Life of Rembrandt" which is a masterpiece of biography. Kuenen, who died but ten years ago, was a biblical critic of European celebrity. But the list of contemporary Dutch writers ...
— Holland - The History of the Netherlands • Thomas Colley Grattan
... contemporaries, Samuel Ireland, the engraver, and the father of the fraudulent author of Vortigern, wrote A Picturesque Tour through Holland, Brabant, and part of France, in 1789, while a few years later one of Charles Lamb's early "drunken companions," Fell, wrote A Tour through the Batavian Republic, 1801; and both of these books yield a few experiences not without interest. Fell's is the duller. I quote from them now and again throughout this volume, ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... their characters rigidly alone, and allow the reader to see them without looking through the author's personality. But there is a type of literature wherein the chief charm for the reader lies in the fact that he is permitted to see things through the author's mind. When we read Charles Lamb's essay on "The South Sea House," we read it not so much to look at the deserted and memorable building as to look at Elia looking at it. Similarly many readers return again and again to "The Newcomes" not so much for the pleasure of ...
— A Manual of the Art of Fiction • Clayton Hamilton
... Berwick-on-Tweed, naming every river and hill, dramatising, as it were, every convolution, contact and contour; and not forgetting history either. That means a mighty piece of work, of such a scope and purport that we may well grudge him the doing of it Charles Lamb, who loved a poet because he was bad, I believe, as a mother will love a crippled child, is more generous to Drayton than I can be. "That panegyrist of my native earth," he calls him, "who has gone over her soil, in his Polyolbion, with the fidelity of a herald, and ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... Charles Lamb counsels those who would enjoy true peace and quiet to retire into a Quaker meeting; and if our sentimental readers (and for such only is this paper written) would find wherewithal to feed and pamper their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... Macleod has followed the plot more closely than Mary and Charles Lamb, and a charming book of ...
— Forgotten Tales of Long Ago • E. V. Lucas
... wonder that his marvellous mind retained its freshness at all after the poison had passed from amid the delicate tissues of the brain. He conquered himself at last; but I fear that his health was impaired by his few mad outbursts. Charles Lamb, who is dear to us all, reduced himself to a pitiable state by giving way to outbreaks of alcoholic craving. When Carlyle saw him, the unhappy essayist was semi-imbecile from the effects of drink; and the savage Scotsman wrote some cruel words which will unfortunately ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... matter and about all the professions, as he does about everything else, than I do. My opinion is that he has studied two, if not three, of these professions in a regular course. I don't know that he has ever preached, except as Charles Lamb said Coleridge always did, for when he gets the bit in his teeth he runs away with the conversation, and if he only took a text his talk would be a sermon; but if he has not preached, he has made a ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... had the insight and the power to restore Shakespeare in all his fulness to English readers were wholly free from this ignorance—conspicuously Charles Lamb and S.T. Coleridge. Coleridge was indeed the first of Englishmen to think out anything like a complete and satisfactory theory of poetry and the fine arts. The supreme value of his theory comes from the fact ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... flight), characterizing the purpose to which my secluded nook is applied as a refuge, whither I fly from the unmeaning noise and vanity of the world; and the prefix, "con" (equivalent to cum, with), conveying the idea of its social designation. For I should be loth to have it thought that, like Charles Lamb's rat, who, by good luck, happening to find a Cheshire cheese, kept the discovery a profound secret from the rest of the rats, in order to monopolize the delicious dainty, pretending all the while that his long and frequent absences at a certain hole were purely for purposes of heavenly ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... be decided whether to print these poems in their true order as they were first published—in Coleridge's Poems on Various Subjects, 1796; in Charles Lloyd's ems on the Death of Priscilla Farmer, 1796; in Coleridge's Poems, second edition, 1797; in Blank Verse by Charles Lloyd and Charles Lamb, 1798; and in John Woodvil, 1802—with all their early readings; or whether to disregard chronological sequence, and wait until the time of the Works—1818—had come, and print them all together then. I decided, in the interests of their biographical value, to print them in the order ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... trout better than a ten-foot sturgeon? I would rather read a tiny essay by Charles Lamb than a five-hundred page libel on life by a modern British novelist who shall be nameless. Flavour is the priceless quality. Style is the thing that counts and is remembered, in literature, ...
— Fisherman's Luck • Henry van Dyke
... considered Byron the only poet of transcendent talents we had had since Dryden. There is preserved a curious record of his meeting with a greater poet than Dryden, but one whose greatness neither he nor Scott suspected. Mr. Crabb Robinson reports Wordsworth to have said, in Charles Lamb's chambers, about the year 1808, "These reviewers put me out of patience. Here is a young man who has written a volume of poetry; and these fellows, just because he is a lord, set upon him. The young man will do something, if he goes on as he has begun. But these reviewers seem to ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... he was born earlier than any other in the group and did his chief work in their time and before the later group appeared. Except Wordsworth, all these were gone before Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837. Three other names could be called: Keats, Robert Burns, and Charles Lamb. All would illustrate what we are studying. Keats least of all and Burns most. They are omitted here not because they did not feel the influence of the English Bible, not because they do not constantly show its ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... la What-do-you-call-'em, and a pint of St. Emilion; but ordered their beefsteak and pint of port from the "plump head-waiter at the Cock;" did not disdain the pit of the theatre; and for a supper a homely refection at the tavern. How delightful are the suppers in Charles Lamb to read of even now!—the cards—the punch—the candles to be snuffed—the social oysters—the modest cheer! Whoever snuffs a candle now? What man has a domestic supper whose dinner-hour is eight o'clock? Those little meetings, in the memory of many of us yet, are gone quite away ...
— The Newcomes • William Makepeace Thackeray
... somewhere in our experience, the actual study done to right it varies indefinitely with the individual. The savage follows a hit-and-miss method of investigation, and really makes his advances by happy guesses rather than by close application. Charles Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig furnishes a typical ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... Inn Fields, close to where the Inns of Court Hotel now stands, and not far from the spot which was destined to witness the terrible tragedy which was at once to darken and glorify the life of one of Milton's most fervent lovers, Charles Lamb. About this time he is supposed to have abandoned pedagogy. The habit of pamphleteering stuck to him; indeed, it is one seldom thrown off. It is much easier to ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... of Charles Lamb's quaint tender "Old familiar faces," as full of melancholy pathos as human eyes brimming with unshed tears; and from it her thoughts gradually drifted to another poem, which she had first heard from Mr. Lindsay during the week of his departure, and later from the sacred ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... life. His artistic work also was left comparatively untainted by the morbid strain of mysticism that runs through his so-called "prophetic writings." The charm of Blake's poetry, as well as of his drawings, was not fully appreciated until late in the Nineteenth Century. Charles Lamb, to be sure, declared, "I must look upon him as one of the extraordinary persons of the age," but his full worth was not recognized until Swinburne and Rossetti took up his cause. In America, Charles Eliot Norton, at Harvard, was Blake's ablest ...
— A History of the Nineteenth Century, Year by Year - Volume Two (of Three) • Edwin Emerson
... Goose". Travesty and Satire. The "Charles Lamb" of Richmond. Camp Wit. Novel Marriage. A "Skirmisher". Prison Humor. Even in Vicksburg! Sad Bill-of-Fare. Northern Misconception. Richmond Society Wit. The "Mosaic Club" and its Components. Innes Randolph's Forfeit. The Colonel's Breakfast Horror. ...
— Four Years in Rebel Capitals - An Inside View of Life in the Southern Confederacy from Birth to Death • T. C. DeLeon
... stories of witchcraft confute themselves, as may be seen in all the trials for that offence. Upon this subject I would say with my old friend Charles Lamb— ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... New The Hambledon Men The Open Road The Friendly Town Her Infinite Variety Good Company The Gentlest Art The Second Post A Little of Everything Harvest Home Variety Lane The Best of Lamb The Life of Charles Lamb A Swan and Her Friends London Revisited A Wanderer in Venice A Wanderer in Paris A Wanderer in London A Wanderer in Holland A Wanderer in Florence The British School Highways and Byways in Sussex Anne's Terrible Good Nature The ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas
... of apoplexy while charging the Grand Jury at Stafford. He wrote much for reviews, and in 1835 produced Ion, a tragedy, followed by The Athenian Captive (1838), and The Massacre of Glencoe, all of which were acted with success. T. was the friend and literary executor of Charles Lamb (q.v.), and pub. in two sections his Memoirs and Letters. In 1837 he introduced the Copyright Bill, which was passed with modifications ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... What delightful revelry! what innocent mirth! prolonged though it was till long after dawn. Poor Mrs. Lennox died in distress in 1804, at the age of eighty-three. Could Johnson but have lived he would have lent her his helping hand. He was no fair-weather friend, but shares with Charles Lamb the honour of being able to unite narrow means and ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... afraid it may be said with justice, that both this letter and the following Essay are "sermoni propiora," according to Charles Lamb's translation, "properer for a sermon:" but it is impossible to dwell long on any such subject as the one which I have chosen, without having to appeal to the best motives of human endeavour; and the shortest way even to the ...
— The Claims of Labour - an essay on the duties of the employers to the employed • Arthur Helps
... delicate flush, the bright eyes, the long eyelashes, which we often see in a young girl on whom consumption is doing its work. You know the peachy complexion which often goes with undeveloped scrofula. And had Charles Lamb not been trembling on the verge of insanity, the Essays of Elia would have wanted great part of their strange, undefinable charm. Had Ford and Massinger led more regular lives and written more reasonable sentiments, what a caput mortuum their tragedies would be! Had Coleridge been a ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... loves a sermon, and is glad to hear preachers who are not bound by the proprieties of the religious pulpit. Some essayists, like Johnson, have been as solemn as the true clerical performer, and some have diverged into the humorous with Charles Lamb, or the cynical with Hazlitt. At this period the most popular of the lay preachers was probably Sir Arthur Helps, who provided the kind of material—genuine thought set forth with real literary skill and combined with much popular sentiment—which ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... without the aid of the newspapers, the people who really care for literature or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are relatively few. If we could procure a completely confidential statement of the number of persons to whom the names of Charles Lamb and Gainsborough have a distinct meaning, and still more of those who can summon up an impression of the essays of the one and of the pictures of the other, we should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet since these names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what must ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... multitude of weaknesses with a flamboyant cloak of charity. [Now, here I go again; I could have just as easily written "flaming"; but I, too, must copy Berlioz!] He pins haughty, poetic, high-sounding labels to his works, and, like Charles Lamb, we sit open-mouthed at concerts trying to fill in his big sonorous frame with a picture. Your picture is not mine, and I'll swear that the young man who sits next to me with a silly chin, goggle-eyes and cocoanut-shaped head sees as in a fluttering mirror ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... defects of the poem; but once recognized we should dismiss them altogether from mind and turn attention to the far more important beauties. The great qualities of 'The Faerie Queene' are suggested by the title, 'The Poets' Poet,' which Charles Lamb, with happy inspiration, applied to Spenser. Most of all are we indebted to Spenser's high idealism. No poem in the world is nobler than 'The Faerie Queene' in atmosphere and entire effect. Spenser himself is always the perfect gentleman ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... five words long," contains more sparkling gems than these two precious little volumes. Froude speaks in his preface of having made "requisite omissions." A few more omissions might have been made with advantage, especially a brutal passage about Charles Lamb and his sister, which Elia's countless admirers find it hard to forgive. Mrs. Procter, widow of Barry Cornwall, the poet, and herself a most remarkable woman, was so much annoyed by the description of her mother, Mrs. Basil Montagu, and her step-father, the editor of Bacon,* that she published ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... have stooped to this palliation, for he had, not without justice, said of himself "The same parts and application which have made me a poet might have raised me to any honors of the gown." Milton and Marvell neither lived by the Court, nor starved. Charles Lamb most ingeniously defends the Comedy of the Restoration as "the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry," where there was no pretence of representing a real world.[47] But this was certainly not so. Dryden again and again boasts of the superior advantage which his age had over that ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell
... this city probably never dreamed of the theory of Charles Lamb in respect to the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... any literary character whom it is so dangerous to approach without passports and periphrases (securing retreat, if necessary) and plentiful kow-tows as George Borrow. Among all literary clansmen you shall hardly find one more implacable, more fierce, or more blindly fanatical than your Borrovian. Charles Lamb is almost the only author we can think of (out of Scotland) who is worshipped by his admirers with quite the same canine sort of affection. But the cult of Lamb is restricted largely to briefless Templars, to University men and "Oxford M.A.'s"; the ...
— George Borrow - Times Literary Supplement, 10th July 1903 • Thomas Seccombe
... Orleans in 1777; he died at the age of forty-six, some four years later. Kempe, Cooper, and Clerke were promoted to Commanders; and Isaac Smith, Lieutenant. Mr. Wales was appointed Mathematical Master at Christ's Hospital, and Charles Lamb mentions him as having been a ...
— The Life of Captain James Cook • Arthur Kitson
... reflects." "Love is but another name for that inscrutable presence by which the soul is connected with humanity," says Simms. "The beings who appear cold," says Madame Swetchine, "adore where they dare to love." "Man, while he loves, is never quite depraved," says Charles Lamb. "It is possible," says Terence, referring to the unquestionable temporary insanity of the passion, "that a man can be so changed by love that one could not recognize him to be the same person." "Solid love, whose root is virtue, can no ...
— The Golden Censer - The duties of to-day, the hopes of the future • John McGovern
... Naseby, in the spring of the following year (1831), that he made his earliest attempt in verse, the earliest at any rate which has yet been discovered. Charles Lamb, writing to Moxon in August, tells him, 'The Athenaeum has been hoaxed with some exquisite poetry, that was, two or three months ago, in Hone's Book. . . . The poem I mean is in Hone's Book as far back as April. I do not know who wrote it; but 'tis a poem I envy—that and Montgomery's ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald - in two volumes, Vol. 1 • Edward FitzGerald
... which some of them at least possessed in life. The only one of Sir Peter's full-length beauties, who calls up any associations but such as belong to Grammont's Memoirs, is Margaret Lucas, the Duchess of Newcastle. Who does not know her through Charles Lamb, and love her for Charles Lamb's sake? She looks out of place here, between Charles II. and the Duchess of Cleveland; and it was not in a fancy dress of most fantastic style that she wrote her memoir of her husband,—in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Charles Lamb indited one of his most pleasant essays upon the 'Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis.' In the rural districts vagrancy and mendicity still survive, in spite of constabulary forces and petty sessions. But the mendicity of the nineteenth century presents a very different spectacle ...
— Old Roads and New Roads • William Bodham Donne
... the real geniuses in the last hundred years, no two people could ever be found to agree among themselves as to which should be included and which excluded from the artificial catalogue. I have heard Kingsley and Charles Lamb described as geniuses, and I have heard them both absolutely denied every sort of literary merit. Carlyle thought Darwin a poor creature, and Comte regarded Hegel himself as an ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say, helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie, Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... reverenced and upheld, in every form in which it came before him, womanhood.... What a woman should demand is respect for her as she is a woman. Let her first lesson be, with sweet Susan Winstanley, to reverence her sex." CHARLES LAMB: Essays of Elia. ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke
... water, nor in its bed, nor in its shore. Either of these elements, by itself, would be nothing. Confine the fluid contents of the noblest stream in a walled channel of stone, and it ceases to be a stream; it becomes what Charles Lamb calls "a mockery of a river—a liquid artifice—a wretched conduit." But take away the water from the most beautiful river-banks, and what is left? An ugly road with none to travel it; a long, ghastly scar on the bosom ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... Charles Lamb who have striven to emulate him, Mr. Lucas comes nearest to being worthy of him. Perhaps it is because it is natural to him to look upon life and letters and all things with something of Lamb's gentleness, ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... far greater degree than that of any other people. It is a leading trait in all the great English novelists, from Fielding to Thackeray and George Eliot, without excepting Richardson, in whom it is least conspicuous; it is the chief attribute of our finest essayists, from Addison to Charles Lamb; it is harmoniously blended with the fresh and simple pathos of Chaucer and with the passionate moodiness of Carlyle: it holds equal sway with the tragic element in the world created by Shakespeare. When Mr. Besant says that "there is no English ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 15, - No. 86, February, 1875 • Various
... announced to the doves. "It 's expensive, I know, but it 's remarkably good, and music is such a treat to me. Yes, I 'll get two tickets as cheap as I can, send a note to Will, poor lad, he needs fun as much as I do, and we 'll go and have a nice time in some corner, as Charles Lamb ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... memorable worthies of their time, Mr. John Fletcher and Mr. William Shakespeare, gentlemen.' It was included in the folio of Beaumont and Fletcher of 1679. On grounds alike of aesthetic criticism and metrical tests, a substantial portion of the play was assigned to Shakespeare by Charles Lamb, Coleridge, and Dyce. The last included it in his edition of Shakespeare. Coleridge detected Shakespeare's hand in act I., act II. sc. i., and act III. sc. i. and ii. In addition to those scenes, act IV. ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... in 1800 that it continued to be read for half a century afterwards. There are other better tests. Is it alive to-day? What do judges of literature say of it now? Nothing! They smile and that's all. The absurdity of his popularity was felt in his own day. Byron laughed at it; Crabbe growled and Charles Lamb said he had looked at the Farmer's Boy and it made him sick. Well, nobody wants ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a passage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they are examples of what may be found ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton
... lectures, in turn, came many of the essays. Wide as the reading was in various languages, it was mainly in the field of "belles-lettres." Lowell had little or no interest in science or philosophy. Upon one side of his complex nature he was simply a book-man like Charles Lamb, and like Lamb he was tempted to think that books about subjects that did not interest him were not ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... the opening doors, troubled him with a sense of shame. To be sure, he was in the spiritual company of Charles Lamb, and of many another man of brains who has waited under the lamp. But contact with the pittites of Kingsmill offended his instincts; he resented this appearance of inferiority to people who came at their leisure, and took seats in the better parts ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing
... Being the Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, Never before Published. By Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York: D. Appleton ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 4 October 1848 • Various
... of Dr. Johnson, Charles Lamb, Emerson, and all great individualists protect us from bad definitions, and especially from rigid or formal ones! Bad definitions destroy themselves, for if they are thoroughly bad no one believes them, and if they contain those pleasing ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... A strange horror of that lonely mountain graveyard came over me as I watched the little company wending wearily up to the solitary spot. The "sweet habitude of being"—not that I fear death, but that I love life as, for instance, Charles Lamb loved it—makes me particularly affect a cheerful burial-place. I know that it is dreadfully unsentimental, but I should like to make my last home in the heart of a crowded city, or, better still, in one of those social homes of the dead, which the Turks, with a philosophy so beautiful and ...
— The Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... Charles Lamb, as we read the Essays, seems at times to be one of the most enviable of men, but that is only because he is supremely lovable. Who knows how much we owe to the defects of his life? Even the impediment in his speech seems to have been one of the conditions of his genius. He tells ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... private gallery on Walnut Street, where some of the most remarkable literary treasures in the world are stored, such as the original copy of Elia given by Charles Lamb to the lady he wanted to marry, Fanny Kelly. There we also saw some remarkable ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... Vergniaud there will be ten stutterers, and ten more stutterers for one General Foy. Nevertheless, in earlier days, Camille Desmoulins stammered, and yet spoke but little at the Convention. It does not appear that Charles Lamb was a garrulous person, and in the familiar experience of daily life we rarely find stutterers to be rapid talkers. Still, this latter fact really helps M. Chervin's theory, since we may conclude it is precisely because stammerers find that a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... carpet-making; between the showers of autumn he digs, like our first parents, in the Doctor's garden; and in winter, as there is no billiard-table, he takes a turn on the treadmill with his mates. Perhaps, as he does so, he recites Charles Lamb's Pindaric ode:— ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... so captivatingly in his chapter entitled "What is an American"—was ending tragically in civil war. Another whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose "Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier, is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural refinement and delicate sense of fitness, ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... that that is true. I know, too, another thing, and that is, that there will be times when you will feel tired-headed and wish you could rest. Did you ever read about Charles Lamb? You know what beautiful things Charles Lamb wrote. Some of you have read the jolly story of how roast pig was discovered by the young Chinaman. You have read that, and if you ever want a good laugh some time ...
— Silver Links • Various
... himself, unless he is a stranger. As drawing out the people by whom one finds one's self surrounded in society will be treated in a forthcoming essay, I shall not deal with it here further than to tell how a famous pun of Charles Lamb's gave a thoughtful host not only the means of swaying the conversation of the entire table to a subject of universal interest, but as well the means of drawing out a well-informed yet timid girl. Guiding ...
— Conversation - What to Say and How to Say it • Mary Greer Conklin
... soon realizes that "humor is a shock absorber," and that "mirth is the soul's best medicine." When my pupils fail to recognize the efficacy of humor, I establish a rule that they must laugh at least once during each lesson, and very soon they agree with Charles Lamb that "a laugh is worth a hundred groans in any market." One of my foreign pupils said to me when I spoke of his cheerful attitude, "Madam, I laugh that I may not weep." And this is the key to much of the cheerfulness of the blind, whose philosophy is not often understood by their sighted ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... her fascinating book, it was of course very delightful to me to make Mrs. Jameson's acquaintance, which I did at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. Basil Montagu. They were the friends of Coleridge, Hazlitt, Charles Lamb, Proctor (Barry Cornwall, who married Mrs. Montagu's daughter), and were themselves individually as remarkable, if not as celebrated, as many of their more famous friends. Basil Montagu was the son of the Earl of Sandwich and the beautiful Miss Wray, whose German lover murdered ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... themselves as well as to us from the indulgence in too great license of the pen. We know that when men write currente calamo, words and phrases are apt to escape, the full application of which is not observed, until, as Charles Lamb said, "print proves it;" but being conscious that, when treating on the subjects with which we deal, no one would willingly write anything with design to give offence, we shall in future "play the tyrant" on all such occasions with more ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... cutting off the top and bottom words cannot explain. That bookcase was my first step toward ruin. I had a good many books—not of scientific but of delightful literature, the best works of the best authors—and my books were as shabby as Charles Lamb's library. There never were such dilapidated volumes as my De Quinceys. Lydia had Young Mrs. Jardine ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, September 1880 • Various
... we must remember that the brilliance of his gifts was admitted by all; less pardonable is his habit of disparaging other men, and especially other men of letters. His pen-pictures of Mill, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others, are wonderfully vivid but too often sour in flavour; his sketch of Charles Lamb is an outrage on that generous and kindly soul. Too often he was unconscious of the pain given by such random words. When he was brought to book, he was honourable enough to recant. Fearing on one occasion to have offended even the serene loyalty of Emerson, he cries out protestingly, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... their natural talents, or, if their strongest taste cannot become their work, money at least gives them some leisure to cultivate it. The command of leisure, when it is fruitful leisure spent in congenial work, is to many, perhaps, the greatest boon it can bestow. 'Riches,' said Charles Lamb, 'are chiefly good because they give us Time.' 'All one's time to oneself! for which alone I rankle with envy at the rich. Books are good and pictures are good, and money to buy them is therefore good—but to buy ...
— The Map of Life - Conduct and Character • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... Godwin, very dry, I think; indeed with very little worth reading, except two or three Letters of dear Charles Lamb, 'Saint Charles,' as Thackeray once called him, while looking at one of his half-mad Letters, and remember[ing] his Devotion to that quite mad Sister. I must say I think his Letters infinitely better than his Essays; and Patmore says ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... 'Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you,' says Swinburne in his dedicatory epistle to the collected edition of his poems, 'wrote for antiquity: nor need you be assured that when I write plays it is with a view to their being acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black Friars.' In another ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... notes of the lectures at the Royal Institution, concluded a borrowing on my part from Schlegel. Mr. Hazlitt, whose hatred of me is in such an inverse ratio to my zealous kindness towards him, as to be defended by his warmest admirer, Charles Lamb—(who, God bless him! besides his characteristic obstinacy of adherence to old friends, as long at least as they are at all down in the world, is linked as by a charm to Hazlitt's conversation)—only as "frantic;"—Mr. Hazlitt, ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... a book-whelmed generation. It had no novelty of subject to help it to a hearing; the themes were largely the most written-out, in all seeming, that could have been selected,—a few great orthodox names on which opinion was closed and analysis exhausted. Browning, Carlyle, Charles Lamb, and John Henry Newman are indeed very beacons to warn off the sated bookman. A paper on Benvenuto Cellini, one on Actors, and one on Falstaff (by another hand) closed the list. Yet a few weeks made it the literary event of the day. Among epicures of good reading the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 4 • Charles Dudley Warner
... 4. Charles Lamb (1775-1834), English essayist, is noted for his humorous sketches. You should read his "Dissertation on Roast Pig" With his sister Mary, he wrote Tales from Shakespeare, ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... is a dramatic piece attributed to Mr. Beddoes, and partaking largely of his well-known eccentricity and genius, called Death's Jest-Book or the Fool's Tragedy. A republication of Mr. Cottle's twenty-four books of Alfred, though the old pleasant butt and "jest-book" of his ancient friend Charles Lamb, is said hardly to deserve even so many words of mention. Nor is there much novelty in A Selection from the Poems and Dramatic Works of Theodore Korner, though the translation is a new one, and by the clever ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various
... wonderful triumph of divine grace in the Apostle Paul that he should have been so "content in whatsoever state he was" when he was a homeless, and, I fear, also a wifeless man. During my own early ministry in Burlington, N.J., my widowed mother and myself lodged with worthy Quakers, and realized Charles Lamb's truthful description of that quiet, "naught-caballing community." On our removal to Trenton, when I took charge of the newly organized Third Presbyterian Church, we commenced housekeeping in what had once been ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... person who truly cares for beauty, there is a necessary tendency to replace the illusory legal act of ownership by the real spiritual act of appreciation. Charles Lamb already expressed this delightfully in the essay on the old manor-house. Compared with his possession of its beauties, its walks, tapestried walls and family portraits, nay, even of the ghosts of former proprietors, the possession by the legal owner ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... essays are best represented by the following titles, all of which may be found in the table of contents of the eighth volume: The Alhambra by Irving, A Bed of Nettles by Allen, Dream Children, by Charles Lamb. These titles, too, show how broad is the field covered by the essay and how delightful a variety there may be in the one style of composition. The departments of Travel and Adventure, Patriotism and History have ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... what other clubs are doing, of their extent, of their objects, of their ambitions. Above all, we need to enlarge our sympathies, to cultivate sympathy by knowledge; for our prejudices are born of ignorance, and we rarely dislike what we intimately know. As Charles Lamb said: "How can I dislike a man if I know him? Do we ever dislike anything if we know it very well?" With the growth of clubs the purely personal characteristics of them will disappear, or at least be subordinated to larger aims; and it is in the ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... How to get rid of a poor woman and a civil, and the mother of a family dependent in great part upon her labor? We solemnly resolve a hundred times to dismiss G., and we shrink a hundred times from inflicting the blow. At last, somewhat in the spirit of Charles Lamb's Chinaman who invented roast pig, and discovered that the sole method of roasting it was to burn down a house in order to consume the adjacent pig-sty, and thus cook the roaster in the flames,—we ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... glare of light, starting up, cast his eyes upon Mercy, the stout serving maiden, and bearer of that same precious porcelain—for which my dear mother's reverence was as great, every whit, as that of Charles Lamb's for old China; and how the next moment the waiter was in the hands of my six feet seven and a-half cousin, with "Du let me help you, young woman!" and how the next instant the six feet seven and a-half formed a horizontal line with the floor, ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... Southey. The Revolutionary Poets. Byron and Shelley. Keats. The Minor Poets. Campbell, Moore, Keble, Hood, Felicia Hemans, Leigh Hunt and Thomas Beddoes. The Fiction Writers. Walter Scott. Jane Austen. The Critics and Essayists. Charles Lamb. De Quincey. Summary of the Period. Selections for ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... expressions of Lanier. One feels often that the worship of what he calls his "sweet masters" is overdone, and that he praises far too highly some obscure sonneteer; but there is in his work the spirit of the romantic critic — the zest of Charles Lamb and Hazlitt for the old masters. Lowell, speaking of a period in his own life when he was delivering his early lectures at Lowell Institute, said: "Then I was at the period in life when thoughts rose in covies, . . . a period of life ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... know and remember Charles Lamb's essay on distant correspondents? Well, I was somewhat of his way of thinking about my mild productions. I did not indeed imagine they were read, and (I suppose I may say) enjoyed right round upon the other side of the big Football we have the honour to inhabit. ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sombre. A life given to art wholly, without patriotism or religion or philosophy, does not prepare the greenest old age. There is a long and beautiful poem, "Le Chateau du Souvenir," which he fills, not exactly with Charles Lamb's "old familiar faces," but with portraits of his mistresses and of his old self. There is the "Last Vow"—to a woman he has pursued "for eighteen years," and whom he still accosts, though "the white graveyard lilacs have blossomed about ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 11, - No. 22, January, 1873 • Various
... to the East-end of London, I had turned my face to that point of the metropolitan compass on leaving Covent-garden, and had got past the India House, thinking in my idle manner of Tippoo-Sahib and Charles Lamb, and had got past my little wooden midshipman, after affectionately patting him on one leg of his knee-shorts for old acquaintance' sake, and had got past Aldgate Pump, and had got past the Saracen's Head (with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... remained up and heard the poet read his poem. The treat was never afterwards forgotten, and one cannot over-estimate such pleasures in forming the character of a child. Nor were such the only intellectual delights the children shared in, for Charles Lamb was among Godwin's numerous friends at this period, and a frequent visitor at his house; and we can still hear in imagination the merry laughter of children, old and young, whom he gathered about him, ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... the beginning of George I. were not a little beholden to Robert Burton" (Archbishop Herring). Dr Johnson deeply admired the work; and Sterne laid it heavily under contribution. But the noble and impassioned devotion of Charles Lamb has been the most powerful help towards keeping alive the memory of the "fantastic great old man." Burton's odd turns and quirks of expression, his whimsical and affectate fancies, his kindly sarcasm, his far-fetched conceits, his deep-lying pathos, descended by inheritance ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... remind myself of a delightful saying of an Englishman of a past generation, Charles Lamb. He was with a group of friends and he spoke harshly of some man who was not present. I ought to say that Lamb stuttered a little bit. And one of his friends said, "Why, Charles, I didn't know that ...
— In Our First Year of the War - Messages and Addresses to the Congress and the People, - March 5, 1917 to January 6, 1918 • Woodrow Wilson
... said, coming back to earth. "I should like the 'Road to Rome,' something of Charles Lamb, Aldrich's 'Story of a Bad Boy,' Heine—-but no! What am I saying? Bring me any solid book on economics. I ought to be reading economics. Economics and Charles Lamb, that will do. Do you ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Charles Lamb was certainly in error? when he described Vittoria's attitude as one of 'innocence-resembling boldness.' In the trial scene, no less than in the scenes of altercation with Brachiano and Flamineo, Webster clearly intended her to pass for a magnificent vixen, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... partially occupied; peopled with the spirits of deceased members of the county and Justices of the Quorum. Would I were buried in the peopled solitude of one, with my feelings at seven years old!'—From Letters of Charles Lamb. ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... April 20, 1764, and March 20, 1778. Charles Lamb in a note to his Essay on the Tragedies of Shakespeare says of Davies, that he 'is recorded to have recited the Paradise Lost better than any man in England in his day (though I cannot help thinking there must be some mistake in this tradition).' ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell
... Charles Lamb used to say that babies had no right to our regard merely as babies, but that every child had a character of its own by which it must stand or fall in the esteem of disinterested observers. Theodosia was a beautiful and forward child, ...
— Famous Americans of Recent Times • James Parton
... part, an ignorance of his trade, which reminds me of a New England clerk. In a New England village I entered the main-street department store one afternoon and said to the clerk at the book counter: 'Let me have, please, the "Letters of Charles Lamb".' 'Post-office right across the street, Mr. Lamb,' said the clerk, with ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... of a beginning, Page asked him what was his favourite character in fiction. She spoke of the beauty of Ruskin's thoughts, of the gracefulness of Charles Lamb's style. The conversation lagged a little. Landry, not to be behind her, declared for the modern novel, and spoke of the "newest book." But Page never read new books; she was not interested, and their talk, unable to establish itself ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... in his youth; teachers were positive that he would have made an inspiring teacher. No one, so far as I know, ever told him that in becoming a book-collector he had deprived the world of a great musician; for he was like Charles Lamb in that he was sentimentally inclined to harmony but organically incapable ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the midst of the most serious topic under discussion he was fond of asking permission to sing a comic song, or he would beg to be allowed to enliven the occasion by the instant introduction of a brief double-shuffle. Barry Cornwall told me that when he and Charles Lamb were once making up a dinner-party together, Charles asked him not to invite a certain lugubrious friend of theirs. "Because," said Lamb, "he would cast a damper even over a funeral." I have often contrasted the habitual qualities of that gloomy friend ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields
... a delightful essay about the whimsical notion of Charles Lamb that he would rather see Sir Thomas Browne than Shakespeare. A pleasant recreation is this same picking out "of persons one would wish to have seen." Causing great annoyance to Ayrton at an evening party, Lamb rejected the names of Milton and Shakespeare, selecting ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... and women of genius of the Old World who abused the use of alcohol and opium, were Coleridge, James Thomson, Carew, Sheridan, Steele, Addison, Hoffman, Charles Lamb, Madame de Stael, Burns, Savage, Alfred de Musset, Kleist, Caracci, Jan Steen, Morland Turner (the painter), Gerard de Nerval, Hartley Coleridge, Dussek, Handel, Glueck, Praga, Rovani, and the poet Somerville. ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... achieved it. But take up any elaborate History of English Literature and read, and, as you read, ask yourselves, 'How can one of the rarest delights of life be converted into this? What has happened to merry Chaucer, rare Ben Jonson, gay Steele and Prior, to Goldsmith, Jane Austen, Charles Lamb?' ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... compounds of tin, feathers, and tiffany, fret but a brief hour; but the playwright, less considered alive, is sooner defunct. I have not Dodsley's Plays by me, but, if my memory does not deceive me, not one of them keeps the stage; nor did dear Charles Lamb make many in love with that huge heap in the British Museum. Alas! all these good people, now grown so rusty, fusty, and forgotten, might have rolled under their tongues, as a sweet morsel, those lines which civil Abraham Cowley ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... on a passage of the "Curse of Kehama," went so far as to say that Paltock's winged people "are the most beautiful creatures of imagination that ever were devised," and added that Sir Walter Scott was a warm admirer of the book. With Charles Lamb at Christ's Hospital the story was a favourite. "We had classics of our own," he says, "without being beholden to 'insolent Greece or haughty Rome,' that passed current among us—'Peter Wilkins,' the 'Adventures of the Hon. Captain Robert Boyle,' the 'Fortunate ...
— Life And Adventures Of Peter Wilkins, Vol. I. (of II.) • Robert Paltock
... make my compliment to those ladies who are offended: but they can no more expect it in a comedy, than to be tickled by a surgeon, when he's letting 'em blood.' Something more than a half-truth is in Charles Lamb's theory, that the old comedy 'has no reference whatever to the world that is': that it is 'the Utopia of Gallantry' merely. Literally, historically, the theory is a fantasy. What the Restoration dramatists did not borrow from France was inspired directly by the court of Charles ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... and the landlords at the stopping-places were sometimes, however, of a much more prosaic and solemn character. Charles Lamb has given us such a scene. "I was travelling," he says, "in a stage-coach with three male Quakers, buttoned up in the straitest nonconformity of their sect. We stopped to bait at Andover, where a meal, partly tea apparatus, partly supper, was set before us. My friends confined ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... every line and angle, is all that remains of the South Sea House. It is a melancholy place—the Hall of the Kings at Karnak is hardly more melancholy or more ghost-haunted. Not that the house has now that "desolation something like Balclutha's" which Charles Lamb attributed to it more than half a century ago. The place has changed greatly since Elia the Italian and Elia the Englishman were fellow-clerks at the South Sea House. Those dusty maps of Mexico, "dim as dreams," have long been ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume I (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... two or three selections obediently, but without enthusiasm. Were they from Herrick and Charles Lamb? I ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... natural capacity for health and enjoyment. If these innocent creatures cannot move you for themselves, how can I possibly hope to move you in their name? The most delightful paper, the most charming essay, which the tender imagination of Charles Lamb conceived, represents him as sitting by his fireside on a winter night telling stories to his own dear children, and delighting in their society, until he suddenly comes to his old, solitary, bachelor self, and finds that they were but dream-children who might have been, but never were. "We are ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens |
