Charles Lamb by Walter Jerrold
page 65 of 97 (67%)
page 65 of 97 (67%)
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boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a
measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school-master are coarse or thin. The next essay--the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had not appeared in the "London Magazine"--is a pretty bit about "Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life--without success--to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man." "Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these |
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