"Charles Lamb" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of style and diction, passionate earnestness, effective contrasts, distinctness of plot, unity, and completeness, this novel is without a rival. It is a "midnight darling" that Charles Lamb would have exulted in, and perhaps the best as yet ...
— Moods • Louisa May Alcott
... two or three selections obediently, but without enthusiasm. Were they from Herrick and Charles Lamb? ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... narrative would have resulted. One of Johnson's 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, but I might mention here a few of their ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... of these men exercised the strongest influence on their destinies, while, on the other hand, disappointment and consequent celibacy have done the same to their victims. To the bachelor list of modern days, which can boast of Charles Lamb and Macaulay, America adds the proud name of Washington Irving, whose early ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... given us again the most remarkable letter-writers in the English language—Margaret Paston, Horace Walpole and Edward FitzGerald. To these there were only three serious rivals as letter-writers—William Cowper, Thomas Grey and Charles Lamb; and the first found a final home and a last resting-place in our midst. It has given us that remarkable novelist and entertaining diarist, Fanny Burney. Finally, it has given us in that same William Cowper—who rests in East Dereham Church, and for whom we claim ...
— Immortal Memories • Clement Shorter
... and no doubt remains Nicky to his intimates today. Edgar Allan Poe was always Eddie to his wife, and Mark Twain was always Youth to his. P. T. Barnum's stable-name was Taylor, his middle name; Charles Lamb's was Guy; Nietzsche's was Fritz; Whistler's was Jimmie; the late King Edward's was Bertie; Grover Cleveland's was Steve; J. Pierpont Morgan's was ...
— Damn! - A Book of Calumny • Henry Louis Mencken
... our power: yes and more of Christian simplicity from my Uncle Toby, Colonel Newcome, even Mr. Pickwick; than from a hundred copybook maxims concerning these virtues: all these figures indeed illustrating the tritest copybook maxim of all—that "Example is better than Precept." Thus Charles Lamb praises the Plays of Shakespeare as "enrichers of the fancy, strengtheners of virtue, a withdrawing from all selfish and mercenary thoughts, a lesson of all sweet and honourable thoughts and actions, to teach courtesy, benignity, generosity, ...
— Poetry • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... 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
... be short enough if it would at all be gracious. Even were Shakespeare's self alive again, or he now but fifteen years since gone home to Shakespeare, {220} of whom Charles Lamb said well that none could have written his book about Shakespeare but either himself alone or else he of whom the book was written, yet could we not hope that either would have any new thing to tell us of the Tempest, the Winter's Tale, and Cymbeline. And for ourselves, what else could we do ...
— A Study of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Charles Lamb, whose father, John Lamb, was clerk to Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, was born in Crown Office Row. In 1809 he took chambers at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where some of the delightful "Elia" essays were penned. In one of these he says, "I was born and passed the first seven ...
— Lippincott's Magazine Of Popular Literature And Science, Old Series, Vol. 36—New Series, Vol. 10, July 1885 • Various
... characters from "the land o' cakes" are sometimes treated in that and other works from the same hand; and the picture of Lismahago in "Humphrey Clinker" is said to have still more violently inflamed their ire. It is to this feeling on the part of his countrymen that Charles Lamb alludes, in his essay upon "Imperfect Sympathies." "Speak of Smollett as a great genius," he says, "and they [the Scots] will retort upon Hume's History compared with his continuation of it. What if the historian had continued ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, No. 20, June, 1859 • Various
... 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, and who brightened at his ...
— Mrs. Shelley • Lucy M. Rossetti
... in a letter to a lady in her last illness, the words of Charles Lamb, when in a gay fancy with some friends as to how he and they would feel if the greatest of the dead were to appear suddenly in flesh and blood once more—on the first suggestion, and "if Christ entered this room?" changed ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... John Street, Clerkenwell), and when the man cried to the boys—'Who will go and be a devil, and he shall see the play for nothing?' then would he go in and be a devil upon the stage, and so get to see plays." In one of his most delightful papers, Charles Lamb has described his first visit to a theatre. He "was not past six years old, and the play was 'Artaxerxes!' I had dabbled a little in the 'Universal History'—the ancient part of it—and here was the Court of Persia. It was being admitted to a sight of the past. ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... was advanced with an eagerness ludicrously at variance with the difference of their respective situations. It seemed—as Charles Lamb said of humorous letters to distant lands—as though eagerness must grow so stale before it reached the summit of this ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... 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 melancholy, let them follow the mercenary flags, and become haunters of auctions,—let ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his 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 ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... Brighton are many and various. Charles Lamb lived for some years is Sussex House, Ship Street. Paston House was the home of William Black before he removed to Rottingdean. Ainsworth produced a goodly portion of his historical novels at No. 5, Arundel Terrace, and at 4 Percival Terrace, ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... experimental reading with Charles Lamb. I choose Lamb for various reasons: He is a great writer, wide in his appeal, of a highly sympathetic temperament; and his finest achievements are simple and very short. Moreover, he may usefully lead ...
— Literary Taste: How to Form It • Arnold Bennett
... A Portrait of 1783 was written on a French engraving after Morland, and Benedetta Ramus was addressed to a mezzotint (an artist's proof, 'very rare'). It is after Romney and is 'My Beauty,' as Charles Lamb said (once, unluckily, to a Scot) of an engraving, after Lionardo, of some ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... 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. Few finer things ...
— Old English Plays, Vol. I - A Collection of Old English Plays • Various
... had to 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 ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb IV - Poems and Plays • Charles and Mary Lamb
... refreshing to read the almost childlike 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, ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims
... and lamented that they had no alternative beyond the needle, the wash-tub, the school-room, and the street, we have yet resisted their admission into every new occupation, denied them training, and cut their compensation down. Like Charles Lamb, who atoned for coming late to the office in the morning by going away early in the afternoon, we have, first, half educated women, and then, to restore the balance, only half paid them. What innumerable obstacles have been placed in the way of female physicians! what a complication of difficulties ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 3, No. 16, February, 1859 • Various
... courtier when he wrote the Masque at Ludlow Castle," says Charles Lamb, "and still more of a courtier when he composed the 'Arcades'" (a masque, or entertainment presented to the Countess Dowager of Derby, at Harefield, by some noble persons of her family). "When the national struggle was to begin, he becomingly ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... not tell the exact truth, and Violet's despairing face lightens. Marcia may have Charles Lamb's way of thinking the truth too precious to be wasted upon everybody, for she is sometimes extremely economizing. And ...
— Floyd Grandon's Honor • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... all the bad people buried?" asks every man, with Charles Lamb, as he strolls among the rank grave-yard grass, and brushes it aside to read of the faithful husband, and the loving wife, and ...
— Prue and I • George William Curtis
... Charles Lamb who said, the peculiarity of the small fore-feet of the Kangaroo seemed to be for picking pockets; but he forgot to mention the singularity characterizing the animal kingdom of Australia, that they ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... frank about the matter, the camp is not stimulating to the studious side of my mind. Charles Lamb, as usual, has said what I feel: "I am not much a friend to out-of-doors reading. I cannot settle my ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... everywhere. Burr made friends and devoted allies among all sorts of men. During his stay in France, England, Germany, and Sweden he interested such men as Charles Lamb, Jeremy Bentham, Sir Walter Scott, Goethe, and Heeren. They found his mind able to meet with theirs on equal terms. Burr, indeed, had graduated as a youth with honors from Princeton, and had continued his studies ...
— Famous Affinities of History, Vol 1-4, Complete - The Romance of Devotion • Lyndon Orr
... poetry {73} is almost purely sensuous. The personages in the Faery Queene are not characters, but richly colored figures, moving to the accompaniment of delicious music, in an atmosphere of serene remoteness from the earth. Charles Lamb said that he was the poet's poet, that is, he appealed wholly to the artistic sense and to the love of beauty. Not until Keats did another English poet appear so filled with the passion for all outward shapes of beauty, so exquisitely alive to all impressions ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... dwell thus long on the 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 of his own imagination, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... paid his genius. Who passes Shakespeare in his library without a caress of eye or hand? I would apologize if I were guilty of such a breach of literary etiquette. Boswell's Johnson edited Shakespeare; and Charles Lamb and Goethe and DeQuincey and Coleridge and Taine and Lowell and Carlyle and Emerson have written of him, some of them greatly. I wonder Macaulay kept hands from him, but probably because he was the historian of action rather ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... they are great personalities, and have displayed their greatness in imaginative writings or in uttering fertile and inspiring conversational dicta. Imagine what one's responsibility would have been if one could have persuaded Charles Lamb to have taken up the task of editing the works of Beaumont and Fletcher, and to have deserted his ephemeral contributions to literature. Or if one could have induced Shelley to give up writing his wild lyrics, and devote himself to composing a work on Political Justice. Jowett, ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson
... broaden the reader's sympathies and develop a keener sense of responsibility for lessening the misery of the world and for protecting even the sparrow from falling. It will cultivate precisely that side of human nature which stands most in need of development. To emphasize these points, Charles Lamb said, "Get the writings of John Woolman by heart," and Whittier wrote of Woolman's Journal, which he edited and made easily accessible, "I have been awed and solemnized by the presence of a serene ...
— History of American Literature • Reuben Post Halleck
... 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, a professed devotee, sounded the true note of Teaism when he wrote that the greatest pleasure he knew was to do a good action by stealth, and to have it found out by accident. For Teaism is the art of concealing beauty that you may discover it, of suggesting what you dare not reveal. ...
— The Book of Tea • Kakuzo Okakura
... as she placed the drawing in her mother's hands. "I wish the forest belonged to some one who had not this cruel taste for turning knotted oak trees into fancy work-tables. It is as bad as what Charles Lamb said of the firs, 'which look so romantic alive, and die into desks.'—Die into desks!" repeated Hermione musingly, as she seated herself on the sofa, and took up a book that was before her on the table; mechanically removing her bonnet from her head, and laying it ...
— The Fairy Godmothers and Other Tales • Mrs. Alfred Gatty
... ready and willing to recognize his own failures than Motley. He was as honest and manly, perhaps I may say as sympathetic with the feeling of those about him, on this occasion, as was Charles Lamb, who, sitting with his sister in the front of the pit, on the night when his farce was damned at its first representation, gave way to the common feeling, and hissed and hooted lustily with the others around him. It was what might ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... period heard the same words, taken by me from my 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, I say, himself replied to an assertion of my plagiarism ...
— Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher • S. T. Coleridge
... never saw his opinions in the making, still rude, still inconsistent, and requiring to be fashioned by thought and discussion. They came forth, like the pillars of that temple in which no sound of axes or hammers was heard, finished, rounded, and exactly suited to their places. What Mr. Charles Lamb has said, with much humour and some truth, of the conversation of Scotchmen in general, was certainly true of this eminent Scotchman. He did not find, but bring. You could not cry halves to anything that turned up while you were ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... 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 artist and a commonplace architect, but he seemed to have social ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... Louis who never came back had made no progress, had not added an inch, not to say a cubit, to his statue, while Mr Henley remained in statu quo, and was so only to be judged. It is an instance of the imperfect sympathy which Charles Lamb finely celebrated—only here it is acknowledged, and the "imperfect sympathy" pled as a ground for claiming the full insight which only sympathy can secure. If Mr Henley was fair to the Louis he knew and loved, it is clear that he was and could only be unjust to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... must be understood as referring to the average man in each case—the "Man on the Cars," as our cousins have it. It would be a very different position, and one hardly tenable, to maintain that the land of Mark Twain has produced greater literary humorists than the land of Charles Lamb. In the matter of comic papers it may also be doubted, even by those who most appreciate American humour, whether England has altogether the worst of it. It is the fashion in the States to speak of "poor old Punch," and to affect astonishment ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... free! free as air! I will live another fifty years.... Would I could sell you some of my leisure! Positively the best thing a man can do is—Nothing; and next to that, perhaps, Good Works." Two years—two long and tedious years passed; and Charles Lamb's feelings had undergone an entire change. He now discovered that official, even humdrum work—"the appointed round, the daily task"—had been good for him, though he knew it not. Time had formerly been his friend; it had now become his enemy. To ...
— Character • Samuel Smiles
... fallow! 'Chance,' it is said by an ingenious historian, who, having been long a secretary in the East India House, must certainly have had access to the best information upon Eastern matters—'Chance,' it is said by Mr. Charles Lamb, 'which burnt down a Chinaman's house, with a litter of sucking-pigs that were unable to escape from the interior, discovered to the world the excellence of roast-pig.' Gunpowder, we know, was invented by a similar fortuity." [The reader will observe ...
— The Fitz-Boodle Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... 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 ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... me 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 ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... early sixteenth," he used to say; any relic or scrap from Caxton's or De Worde's Press; any specimen of a "truant type" on the page of an early book; or a Caslon, or a Baskerville in good condition; or one of the beauties from Mr Morris's modern Press. Charles Lamb himself could not have looked more radiant or more happy in the ...
— Kilgorman - A Story of Ireland in 1798 • Talbot Baines Reed
... audiences fools, to any unusual extent. If any one is inclined to form a low opinion of the Elizabethans intellectually, on account of the divergence of their capacities of belief in this respect from his own, he does them a great injustice. Let him take at once Charles Lamb's warning, and try to understand, rather than to judge them. We, who have had the benefit of three hundred more years of experience and liberty of thought than they, should have to hide our faces for very shame had we ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... 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 Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... To Charles Lamb. A sympathetic reply. To Joseph Cottle. Literary adventurers. To Josiah Wade. A public example. To Thomas Allsop. Himself and his detractors. To the same. The Great Work ...
— Selected English Letters (XV - XIX Centuries) • Various
... and unsoundness sometimes adds to beauty. You know the 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 ...
— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd
... limits of the Scottish Arcadia; to the hills near Edinburgh, where Ramsay's Gentle Shepherd loved and sang in a rather affected way; and to the main stream and the tributaries of the Tweed. He tells, with a humour like that of Charles Lamb in his account of his youthful search for the mysterious fountain-head of the New River, how he sought among the Pentland Hills for the source of the brook that flowed past his own garden. The wandering stream led him through many a scene renowned in ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... passengers 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 themselves to ...
— A Hundred Years by Post - A Jubilee Retrospect • J. Wilson Hyde
... 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 those of Browne ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... 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 ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... 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 influence, but because they are not so creative as the others; they ...
— The Greatest English Classic A Study of the King James Version of • Cleland Boyd McAfee
... at 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
... 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 to look ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... mightier than intellect. Wherever he moved a light ne'er seen on land nor sea shone on man. It was more than eminent beauty or supreme genius. His scepter was not through cunning of brain or craft of hand; reality was his throne. "Therefore," said Charles Lamb, "if Shakespeare should enter the room we should rise and greet him uncovered, but kneeling meet the Nazarene." His gift cannot be bought nor commanded; but his secret and charm may be ours. Acceptance, obedience, companionship with him—these are the keys of power. The legend is, that so long as ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... friend; whilst as for pork, apart from all other considerations, I can claim for it a distinct place in English literature. A greater essayist by far than the critic to whom I am referring, a certain Mr. Charles Lamb, of the India House, has left us an immortal page on the origin of roast pig and crackling. And, when everything is considered, I should much like to know why novels should be confined to the aspirations of the soul, and why they ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... we need to enlarge our knowledge of 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; ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... Was Charles Lamb right when he spoke of "the uncommunicating muteness of fishes"? These beleaguered mullet surely exchanged ideas and acted with deliberation and in concert. All swayed this way or that in accordance, so it seemed, with the will of the front rank. A ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... into the Latin soil. There is more of the vigour of originality and of living truth in the following ode to Barine (II. 8), where he gives us a cameo portrait, carved with exquisite finish, of that beaute de diable, "dallying and dangerous," as Charles Lamb called Peg Woffington's, and, what hers was not, heartless, which never dies out of the world. A real person, Lord Lytton thinks, "was certainly addressed, and in a tone which, to such a person, would have been the most exquisite flattery; and as certainly the person is not so addressed ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... of knowing the late George P. Bradford, upon reading that he was the son of a stout sea-captain of Duxbury, must have recalled Charles Lamb's description of one of his comrades at the old South Sea House—'like spring, gentle offspring of blustering winter.' A more gentle, truthful, generous, constant, high-minded, accomplished man, or, as Emerson, his friend of many years, said of ...
— Early Letters of George Wm. Curtis • G. W. Curtis, ed. George Willis Cooke
... of time. It is not a little curious that one so little realised in his own day, one so little lovable and so little loved, should now speak to us from his pages with something of the force of personal utterance, as if he were actually with us and as if we knew him, even as we know Charles Lamb and Izaak Walton, personalities of such a different calibre. And this man whom we realise does not impress us unfavourably; if he is without charm, he is surely immensely interesting and attractive; he is so strong in his intellectual convictions, he is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... of ages emit the odor of sanctity, and whoever scoffs does so at his peril. Charles Lamb was once criticised for speaking disrespectfully of the equator, and a noted divine was severely taken to task for making unkind remarks about hell. Humanity insists that these time honored institutions be treated with due respect. I have an equal respect for those ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... a pity," she had said, "for us never to talk of anything but that. There are so many things I like to talk about, especially the things of which I read. I am now reading Charles Lamb—that is, whenever I get a chance—and I don't believe anybody in these days ever does read the works of that dear old man. There is a complete set of his books in the library, and they do not look as if they had ever been opened. Did you ever read his little essays on Popular Fallacies? ...
— The Captain's Toll-Gate • Frank R. Stockton
... last forty years, in this country, they have entered a hundred avenues of activity from which they were previously debarred by an unwritten law. They are found in the offices, the shops, the factories. Like Charles Lamb's fugitive pigs, they have run up all manner of streets. Does any one think that in that time there has been an advance in professional, commercial and industrial morality? Are lawyers more scrupulous, ...
— The Shadow On The Dial, and Other Essays - 1909 • Ambrose Bierce
... are an unconscious tribute as much to the man who received them as to the men who wrote them. Conservative critics have talked of Godwin's "coldness" because he could reason. But the abiding and generous regard of such a nature as Charles Lamb's is answer enough to these summary valuations. But Godwin's most characteristic relationship was with the young men who sought him out as an inspiration. He would write them long letters of advice, encouragement, and criticism, and despite his own poverty, would often relieve their distresses. ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... Fortunately in England, at the beginning of the next century, there was a man who dared speak his opinion. Mrs. Barbauld and Mrs. Trimmer (who had contributed "Fabulous Histories" to the juvenile library, and for them had shared the approval which greeted Mrs. Barbauld's efforts) were the objects of Charles Lamb's particular detestation. In a letter to Coleridge, written ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... get . . . for after all, happiness (as the mathematicians might say) lies on a curve, and we approach it only by asymptote. . . . The frequenters of this alley call themselves whimsically The Ludlow Street Business Men's Association, and Charles Lamb or Eugene Field would have been proud to preside at their annual dinners, at which the members recount their ...
— The Haunted Bookshop • Christopher Morley
... heart, his kindness, his soundness of principle, his information, his knowledge, and the intense and eager feelings with which he pours forth all he knows, affect, interest, and enchant one" (Autobiog. i. 298, 384). The diary of Crabb Robinson, the correspondence of Charles Lamb, the delightful autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, and much less delightfully the autobiography of Harriet Martineau, all help us to realise by many a trait Wordsworth's daily walk and conversation. Of all the glimpses that we get, from ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... having passed through a period of insanity, have strongly regretted it "as a state in which the soul, more exalted and more refined, perceives invisible relations and enjoys spectacles that escape the material eyes." Such was Gerard de Nerval. As for Charles Lamb, he would assert that he should be envied the days spent in an insane asylum. "Sometimes," he said in a letter to Coleridge, "I cast a longing glance backwards to the condition in which I found myself; for while it lasted I had many hours of pure happiness. Do not believe, Coleridge, that you ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... my memory no other than a series of very pleasant impressions. Though based on fancy, the delights of some forms of mental disorder are real. Few, if any, sane persons would care to test the matter at so great a price; but those familiar with the "Letters of Charles Lamb" must know that Lamb, himself, underwent treatment for mental disease. In a letter to Coleridge, dated June 10th, 1796, he says: "At some future time I will amuse you with an account, as full as ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers
... stammering become the order of the day, and for one 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 very rapid utterance ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 29. August, 1873. • Various
... 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 Shirley Letters from California Mines in 1851-52 • Louise Amelia Knapp Smith Clappe
... 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 of ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... but this is also the volume of fine essays, the highest type of prose. The 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 ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... 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 you knew ...
— 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
... more particular nowadays about cleanliness than were those of a past generation. Charles Lamb, during a whist game, ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... in Holborn, backing upon Lincoln's 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... I look after the place and try to keep it a little tidy. I have dug my own little hole,' she went on, to Laura, 'and when you are sent for you must come and put me in.' This evocation of mortality led Mr. Wendover to ask her if she had known Charles Lamb; at which she stared for an instant, replying: 'Dear me, no—one didn't ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... grew naturally out of his general literary trade, and had not a little in common with the rest of his abundant stock. All his productions in this line, his masterpiece, Robinson Crusoe, as well as what Charles Lamb calls his "secondary novels," Captain Singleton, Colonel Jack, Moll Flanders, and Roxana, were manufactured from material for which he had ascertained that there was a market; the only novelty lay in the mode of preparation. From ...
— Daniel Defoe • William Minto
... 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 ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... me for a country gentleman." Malcolm so dearly loved argument for 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
... aroused from his meditation by the 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, instead ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII No. 6 June 1848 • Various
... answering pandemonium we refused to hold the lieutenant accountable for the death of the victim of the African assegais! And the ladies! How ravishingly they flashed upon the boards, in frocks that, like Charles Lamb at the India Office, made up for beginning late by finishing early! How I used to agree with the bewitching creature who sang that lovely lyric strangely omitted from ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... begin a story which must of necessity tax the powers of belief of readers unacquainted with the class of facts to which its central point of interest belongs without some words in the nature of preparation. Readers of Charles Lamb remember that Sarah Battle insisted on a clean-swept hearth before sitting down to her favorite game ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the part afterwards printed (with some additions) as "The Destiny of Nations," and in Coleridge's first volume of "Poems" (Bristol, 1796). A more important contributor to this volume, however, was Charles Lamb, whose initials were appended to four of the pieces. A second edition appeared in June, 1797, with eleven additions from Coleridge besides verses by Lamb and Charles Lloyd, all under the title: "Poems by S.T. Coleridge. Second Edition. To which are added Poems ...
— Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Select Poems • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... Elia. Those charming productions, now ranked among our dearly treasured classics, were not received at first with universal approbation. The long and justly forgotten Alaric A. Watts said of them: "Charles Lamb delivers himself with infinite pain and labour of a silly piece of trifling, every month, in this Magazine, under the signature of Elia. It is the curse of the Cockney School that, with all their desire to appear exceedingly off-hand and ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... 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 ...
— The Lost Hunter - A Tale of Early Times • John Turvill Adams
... road made in Venetia since Napoleon drove his straight, poplar-bordered highways through the land. M. Joseph Reinach, who was my companion upon the French front, was equally impressed by the stirring up and exchange of ideas in the villages due to the movement of the war. Charles Lamb's story of the discovery of roast pork comes into one's head with an effect of repartee. More than ideas are exchanged in the war zone, and it is doubtful how far the sanitary precautions of the military authorities avails against ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... the apex of our pilgrimage. To come upon India House is like stepping back into the world of Charles Lamb. We had once lunched in the clubrooms upstairs with a charming member and we had never forgotten the old seafaring prints, the mustard pots of dark blue glass, the five-inch mutton chops, the Victorian contour of the waiter's waistcoat of green and yellow stripe. This time we fared toward ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... varied aims in respect to scope and compass, yet all in a certain measure participating in the credit of admitting to their homes products of intellectual industry and ingenuity beyond such matter as Family Bibles, Directories, Railway Guides, Charles Lamb's Biblia-a-Biblia, and sixpenny or threepenny editions of popular authors, which constitute the staple decorations of the average British middle-class household in this ...
— The Book-Collector • William Carew Hazlitt
... benevolence which Mrs. Mott possesses in a degree far above the average, of necessity had countless modes of expression. She was not so much a champion of any particular cause as of all reforms. It was said of Charles Lamb that he could not even hear the devil abused without trying to say something in his favor, and with all Mrs. Mott's intense hatred of Slavery we do not think she ever had one unkind feeling toward the slave-holder. Her longest, ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... described 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 purity of whose ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... Englishman and Shakspeare a German, the incredible mare's-nest Goethe finds in looking for the origin of Byron's Manfred,—these are things from which no deliberate care or reflection can save a man; only an instinct can save him from them, an instinct that they are absurd; who can imagine Charles Lamb making Herr Gervinus's blunder, or Shakspeare making Goethe's? but from the sheer German nature this intuitive tact seems something so alien, that even genius fails to give it. And yet just what constitutes ...
— Celtic Literature • Matthew Arnold
... 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 half truths ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... to his flattened, broken nose. A lady said to him: "There is only one thing about you I could never get over, your nose." "No wonder, madam, there is no bridge to it." The other was an invitation to supper in Charles Lamb's own writing, and at the bottom of the page, ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn
... returning to Ford late in life, found "that the greater part of what [he] once took on trust as precious was really paste and pinchbeck," and that as far as the celebrated closing scene in "The Broken Heart" was concerned, Charles Lamb's comment on it was "worth more than all Ford ever wrote."[92] Hazlitt's dispassionate sanity in this instance forms an instructive contrast: "Except the last scene of the Broken Heart (which I think extravagant—others may think it sublime, and be right) they [Ford's plays] are merely exercises ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... legion, and it has appeared in mutilated versions under the auspices of numerous publishing houses in London and the provinces, although of late years there have been no new issues. Even in 1802, Charles Lamb in writing ...
— Goody Two-Shoes - A Facsimile Reproduction Of The Edition Of 1766 • Anonymous
... CHARLES LAMB once, while riding in company with a lady, descried a party denuded for swimming a little way off. He remarked: "Those girls ought to go to a more retired place." "They are boys," replied the lady. "You may be right," rejoined Charlie, ...
— The Book of Anecdotes and Budget of Fun; • Various
... [One of Charles Lamb's most beautiful and plaintive poems was suggested by this old dialogue. The tune is given in Chappell's Popular Music, p. 167. In Carey's Musical Century, 1738, it is called the 'Old tune of Death and the Lady.' The four concluding ...
— Ancient Poems, Ballads and Songs of England • Robert Bell
... in Middlesex, 10 m. NE. of London, has a celebrated Government rifle factory; was for six years the dwelling-place of Charles Lamb. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... the age in their stories of Irish and English life. Coleridge and Wordsworth began to attract attention toward the last of this period, and to be much read by those who loved the poetry of thought and the poetry of nature; while, early in the next reign, Charles Lamb published his delightful ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... when he wrote 'La Saisiaz' than when he published 'A Death in the Desert' and 'Christmas Eve and Easter Day'; or at any period subsequent to that in which he accepted without questioning what he had learned at his mother's knee. He has repeatedly written or declared in the words of Charles Lamb:* 'If Christ entered the room I should fall on my knees;' and again, in those of Napoleon: 'I am an understander of men, and he was no man.' He has even added: 'If he had been, he would have been an ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... one that can write such letters as are in that delightful book of Walter Savage Landor, or as charmed the friends of Charles Lamb, the poet Gray, and a few famous women, first, and the world afterwards. It is not every one who can, with the utmost and wisest painstaking, produce a thoroughly excellent letter. The power to do that is original ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "He was a good man, was Robin" is not so well, and we must own that it is Dickensian; but assuredly Dickens writes such phrases as it were dramatically, playing the cockney. I know of but two words that Dickens habitually misuses, and Charles Lamb misuses one of them precisely in Dickens's manner; it is not worth while to quote them. But for these his English is admirable; he chooses what is good and knows what is not. A little representative collection of the bad or foolish English of his day might be made by gathering up what ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... appreciate the wit of others; it had the vagueness of music and the precision of mathematics. Only one of its qualities was comparable to anything else: it had the warmth of a good heart; but its taste, its smell, its feel, were not to be described in words. Charles Lamb, with his infinite tact, attempting to, might have drawn charming pictures of the life of his day; Lord Byron in a stanza of Don Juan, aiming at the impossible, might have achieved the sublime; Oscar Wilde, heaping jewels of Ispahan upon brocades of Byzantium, might have created a troubling beauty. ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Judgment;' Shelley, his 'Prometheus,' and Wordsworth a new edition of his poems. Besides these giants in the field of literature, numerous stars of the second and third magnitude sent forth their light. Charles Lamb, Hazlitt, Barry Cornwall, Tom Moore, Allan Cunningham, Leigh Hunt, and others, were busy writing and publishing, and John Keats sent his swan-song from the tombs of the Eternal City. In the midst of this galaxy of genius and fame, John Clare stood, in ...
— The Life of John Clare • Frederick Martin
... is not to be found in its 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 of ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... doctor and the springs, "on s'ennui tres considerablement a Vichy." If it be true, that, in some of the lighter annoyances of life, fellowship is decidedly preferable to solitude, ennui comes not within the number—every attempt to divide it with one's neighbours only makes it worse; as Charles Lamb has described the concert of silence at a Quakers' meeting, the intensity increases with the number, and every new accession raises the public stock of distress, which again redounds with a surplus to each individual, "chacun en a son part, et tous l'ont tout entier."[4] What a chorus of ...
— Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 365, March, 1846 • Various
... few names, taken at random, Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Dr. Johnson, De Quincey, Tennyson, and Carlyle were professionals, it is true; but, on the other hand, Milton, Gray, Boswell, Walter Scott, Charles Lamb, Shelley, Browning, and Ruskin were amateurs. It is not a question of how much a man writes or publishes, it is a question of the spirit in which a man writes. Walter Scott became a professional in the last years of his life, and for the noblest of reasons; but ...
— At Large • Arthur Christopher Benson
... modest for a modest man,' Charles Lamb somewhere remarks, 'as he is for himself.' But this is no personal question. What is said of General Trenchard is said of the Flying Corps. The power which Nature made his own, and which attends him like his shadow, is the power given him by his singleness ...
— The War in the Air; Vol. 1 - The Part played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force • Walter Raleigh
... reviewer of Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare committed the worst blunder of all when he wrote that those persons who did not know their Shakespeare might read Mr. Lamb's paraphrase if they liked, but for his part he did not see the use of such works. The man who had never heard of Charles Lamb and his Tales must have very much mistaken his vocation when he set ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... 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 ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... tourist, and what Stanley said about it to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or, indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... masterpiece, which Lord Houghton described as (p. 226) "the finest piece of humoristic description that has been added to British literature since Charles Lamb." ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... smoothly. Eunice had found her way to the child's heart. But then Eunice had lived with her dream children that might have been like Charles Lamb's "Children of Alice." Elizabeth might have married twice in her life, but there was no love in either case, rather a secret mortification that such incapables should dare to raise their thoughts to her. But she had some strenuous ideas on the rearing of children, quite of the older ...
— A Little Girl in Old Salem • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... '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 ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... metropolis. It would appear that these grinders of music, with some few exceptions which we shall notice as we proceed, are distinguished from their praiseworthy exemplars, the musicians, by one remarkable, and to them perhaps very comfortable characteristic. Like the exquisite Charles Lamb—if his curious confession was not a literary myth—they have ears, but no ear, though they would hardly be brought to acknowledge the fact so candidly as he did. They may be divided, so far as our observation goes, into the following classes:—1. Hand-organists; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 430 - Volume 17, New Series, March 27, 1852 • Various
... 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 vigilance ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 192, July 2, 1853 • Various
... executed with a grave, sweet sincerity. It is not improbable that Clarence was the prototype of Charles in Fletcher's Elder Brother. The finest passage in the present play, where Clarence's modesty and Monford's nobility are portrayed in language of touching charm, was selected by Charles Lamb (whose judgment was never at fault) for quotation in the "Extracts from ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. III • Various
... fond of noble lords: why shouldn't I be? I might have been one myself any day these last ten years; I might now, if I chose; but there! Charles Lamb knew a man who wanted to be a tailor once, but hadn't got the spirit. I find I haven't got the spirit to be a noble lord. Even Barty might have been a lord—he, a mere man of letters!—but he refused every honor and distinction that was ever offered to him, either ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... 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 ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... rising into the clouds and forming nuclei for the agglomeration into drops, and not by the mere explosion. If this be the case, if it was the smoke and not the sound that brought the rain, then by burning gunpowder and dynamite we are acting much like Charles Lamb's Chinamen who practised the burning of their houses for several centuries before finding out that there was any cheaper way of securing the ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... present at a discussion of the book at a literary house. Browning, said my friend, was of the party. The discussion turned on the divinity of Christ. After listening awhile, Browning repeated, with some passion, the anecdote of Charles Lamb in conversation with Leigh Hunt, on the subject of "Persons one would wish to have seen"; when, after ranging through literature ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... catch a warmer tint from the free sunshine and fresh air. The languid step becomes elastic with that "springy motion of the gait" which Charles Lamb admired. Yet the general appearance of the city is that of quietude; the youthful multitude passes on calmly, its voices subdued to a lower and softened tone, as if fearful of breaking the repose of the day of rest. A stranger fresh from the gayly spent ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier |
