hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that
wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature,
associated with the name of Lamb. Here, as later in the "Essays of
Elia," we have recollections of the actual events of their own
childhood permeating the invented narratives and imparting a new
interest to the whole. Coleridge prophesied remarkably about this
little book, when in talking to a friend he said:

It at once soothes and amuses me to think--nay, to
know--that the time will come when this little volume of my
dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not
only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the
treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot
help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated
writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems,
Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which,
compared with "Mrs. Leicester's School," will be remembered
as often and praised as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's
Epics and Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophies compared with
"Robinson Crusoe!"

In the "Adventures of Ulysses" Lamb sought to provide what he termed a
supplement to Fénelon's long-popular "Adventures of Telemachus." He
took the story from Chapman's translation of Homer's "Odyssey," that
translation which a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one
of his finest sonnets. In a preface, a model of concise expression,
the author of the tale explained:

By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the
descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the