for collecting materials for a picture of Charles Lamb as a human
being are prodigious. When you have made for yourself such a picture,
read the _Essays of Elia_ the light of it. I will choose one of the
most celebrated, _Dream Children: A Reverie_. At this point, kindly
put my book down, and read _Dream Children_. Do not say to yourself
that you will read it later, but read it now. When you have read it,
you may proceed to my next paragraph.

You are to consider _Dream Children_ as a human document. Lamb was
nearing fifty when he wrote it. You can see, especially from the last
line, that the death of his elder brother, John Lamb, was fresh and
heavy on his mind. You will recollect that in youth he had had
a disappointing love-affair with a girl named Ann Simmons, who
afterwards married a man named Bartrum. You will know that one of the
influences of his childhood was his grandmother Field, housekeeper
of Blakesware House, in Hertfordshire, at which mansion he sometimes
spent his holidays. You will know that he was a bachelor, living with
his sister Mary, who was subject to homicidal mania. And you will
see in this essay, primarily, a supreme expression of the increasing
loneliness of his life. He constructed all that preliminary tableau of
paternal pleasure in order to bring home to you in the most poignant
way his feeling of the solitude of his existence, his sense of all
that he had missed and lost in the world. The key of the essay is one
of profound sadness. But note that he makes his sadness beautiful;
or, rather, he shows the beauty that resides in sadness. You watch him
sitting there in his "bachelor arm-chair," and you say to yourself:
"Yes, it was sad, but it was somehow beautiful." When you have said
that to yourself, Charles Lamb, so far as you are concerned, has
accomplished his chief aim in writing the essay. How exactly he
produces his effect can never be fully explained. But one reason of