INTRODUCTION.
The two volumes of miscellaneous writings by Charles Lamb, published by the Olliers in 1818, contained a variety of prose sufficient to prove once more that the study and practice of verse is one of the best trainings for a prose style. In his dedication of the poetical volume to Coleridge, Lamb half apologises for having forsaken his old calling, and for having "dwindled into prose and criticism." The apology, as I have elsewhere remarked, was hardly needed. If we except the lines to Hester Savary and a few of the sonnets and shorter pieces, there was little in the volume to weigh against the two essays on Hogarth and the tragedies of Shakspeare. It was the result of the miscellaneous and yet thorough character of Lamb's reading from a boy that the critical side of his mind was the first to mature. The shorter papers contributed by Lamb to Leigh Hunt's Reflector in 1811— the year to which belong the two critical essays just mentioned—more or less framed on the model of the Tatler and its successors, give by comparison little promise of the richness and variety of the Elia series of ten years later. On the other hand, there are passages in the critical essays, such as that on Lear, as represented on the stage, and the vindication of Hogarth as a moral teacher, which represent Lamb at his highest.
On the republication of these miscellanies in 1818, it could not be overlooked that a prose writer of something like genius was coming to the front. One of the younger critics of the day, Henry Nelson Coleridge, reviewing the
