persons during his lifetime was to be one of those most widely and
most lovingly known afterwards. He was of the greatest of our
letter-writers. It was perhaps but another aspect of the essayist--or
rather we might say that his work as essayist was the crowning
development of his sedulous habit of being himself when communing on
paper with his intimate friends. It has been suggested that such
finished works as are many of Lamb's letters were, so to speak, built
up bit by bit, and then copied as completed wholes before being
despatched to those for whom they were designed. Whether written with
a running pen, as a large proportion of them undoubtedly were, or
written with the patience of the essayist ponderingly in search of the
_mot juste_, they are always true Lamb, individual expressions far
removed from the ordinary letters of ordinary folk; they are at once
informing revelations of the writer in his relations with his fellows,
and they are always marked by essentially literary qualities. In his
letters will be found not infrequently--both in idea and in
expression--the germs of his essays.

Lamb was first revealed to the reading public as a great letter-writer
in Talfourd's "Memorials of Charles Lamb" nearly seventy years ago.
Since that time each further publication of the letters has brought
fresh material to light which has but gone to strengthen Lamb's
position as one of the first two or three letter-writers whose
epistles have taken their places in English literature. If we must
"place" our great men, there are not wanting critics who would accord
Lamb a position at the very head of those in this particular branch.
"To an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very
pleasant;" thus Lamb in one of his earliest letters to Coleridge, and
there can be little doubt that in this occupation he frequently found
the truth of the statement that the labour we delight in physics pain.