Rosamund Gray, Essays and Letters

Excerpt from Rosamund Gray, Essays and Letters

Without suggesting or believing that even the lightest trifles of a humorist like Lamb are not worthy of preservation, I yet cherish a strong opinion that when a writer has himself chosen for the people "of his best," that best should be at least kept separate from matter of less worth. Acting on the same principle, I have left for a concluding volume (should it be called for) those slighter prose essays and jeux d'esprit which have been collected of late years, and entitled not, I think, very felicitously, Eliana.

I have arranged the poems as far as possible in chronological order. Lamb put so much of his personal history into his verse that when so presented it forms a delightful running commentary upon his life and education. In his early sonnets we read of his happy holiday seasons with his grandmother, Mrs. Field, at Blakesware, and the first and only love romance of his life. Then we are reminded of such alleviations of his sad and monotonous family story as were afforded by a rare excursion to the seaside or the more frequent visit to the theatre, or best of all by his correspondence or occasional meetings with Coleridge and Lloyd. Then, for a while, the verse becomes darkened by domestic calamity, and the sonnet measure of Bowles gives place to the blank verse of Cowper, whose pious example seems to have given courage to Lamb's own deep sense of need to express itself in verse. But as we read" on, we trace mind and spirit recovering from their great shock, and braced by new friendships and fresh literary interests and sympathies.

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