Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 162.djvu/130

 ten epistles — polished and superior in style to much that is nowadays specially written for publication. The penny post- age system has done wonders — it has increased our correspondence a thousand- fold ; it has revolutionized our trade and made distant lands seem near, and at the same time proved fatal to letter-writing as an art. In the old days a letter was an important affair, not to be lightly scrib- bled, and only sent when the writer had something to say. In the present day all the resources of steam and science are strained to deliver promptly letters that are very often jerky, scrawled effusions, the style, and frequently the sense, being sacrificed to the writer's determination to abbreviate and condense, after the man- ner of the postcard and telegram. I f some of the stately letter-writers of the past century were to "re-visit the glimpses of the moon " they would not be more surprised by the postal system of these days than by the modern letter itself; while they would be bewildered by the advance in one respect, they would be shocked at the retrogression in the other. Horace Walpole seems to be, by com- mon consent, regarded as the king of letter-writers ; and others, such as Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Lord Ches- terfield, are remembered chiefly because of their skill in that line of composition. We must confess, however, that their pro- ductions seem a little too stiff and arti- ficial to be altogether pleasing. They, too evidently, belong to an age that was not less graceful than ceremonious and unreal — an age of powder, paint, and pad- ding. While there is much to charm and amuse, there is also an excess of stilted compliment and flowery rhetoric which jars on the modern ear. We think there is something infinitely preferable in the letters of the writer whose name stands at the head of this article. Charles Lamb was endowed with just those qualities and gifts which are the requisites of a suc- cessful letter-writer. His humor, his ex- quisite prose, his keen critical faculties, and especially his charming chit-chat on all sorts of subjects, such as literature, his friends' peculiarities, the incidents of his domestic and business life, — all these help to make his letters the literary gems they are. The fame of Charles Lamb is a growing fame. In his own day he was but little known by the general public, and even now, though his essays are ex- tensively read, we think he merits a much wider recognition. We have a proof of his extraordinary gifts in the fact that all, or nearly all, the chief literary men of his day, some of them intellectual giants, were his friends, and esteemed it a privi- lege to meet at his house. Charles Lamb's suppers were doubtless very poor affairs as such in comparison with the magnifi- cent hospitality of Holland House; bat we doubt whether that stately home, which has for generations welcomed talent and culture of all sorts, ever brought together at one time a company excelling, in splen- did gifts and true genius, the men who used to meet round the literary clerk's modest table. There you might meet the simple-minded but deeply read George Dyer, the mathematical Manning, the scholarly and silver-tongued De Quincey. There, also, the ever-jubilant Leigh Hunt, rivalling his host in daring puns ; gentle Tom Hood, full of poetry and wit ; God- win, Hoicroft, Talfourd, and Hazlitt, each famous in his way, and last and great- est of the group, Robert Southey, poet- laureate and polished gentleman; Words- worth, the inspired leader of a literary reformation, and S. T. Coleridge, poet, scholar, thinker, and the finest talker En- gland has produced. The man who could attract such a constellation, who could inspire warm friendship and esteem in such men, must have been gifted in no ordinary degree. And those who werr never privileged to see or hear him, but who know him only through his writings, soon come to think of him as a personal friend, and to echo Macaulay's words, " We admire his genius, we love the kind nature which appears in all his writings, and we cherish his memory as if we had known him personally." Readers may be divided into two classes: those who like Charles Lamb, and those who know noth- ing about him; and as far as we know, there is but one man of mark who is not included in such a classification — the mournful, solitary exception being Thom- as Carlyle. It would be remarkable, in- deed, if Lamb had escaped a hard word from one who abused and maligned all his contemporaries; therefore we were not surprised at seeing him referred to in Carlyle's "Reminiscences" as a "stam- mering, stuttering torn-fool," together with other epithets, indicative chiefly of the excessive bile of the writer. Charles Lamb was by no means so great a man as Carlyle, but he excelled him in the generous and kindly tone of his corre- spondence. Never does he depreciate a friend, never does he snarl at a contem- porary ; the success of others is not gall and wormwood to him, and he never de-