into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own
narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact--verisimilitudes,
not verities--or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of
history."

Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional
position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an
impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous
luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before
the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme
Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and
criticism, contrasting--from Milton's "Paradise Lost"--the feast
proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the
temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."

With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic
themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the
emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts
them with those that follow when the child has reached his teens. "At
school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers
will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves
less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."

"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's
childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and
interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia
pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's
days when visiting grandmother Field:

When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice