for three months, and read nothing else. I mean that you should
regularly devote a proportion of your learned leisure to
the study of Lamb until you are acquainted with all
that is important in his work and about his work. (You may buy
the complete works in prose and verse of Charles and Mary Lamb,
edited by that unsurpassed expert Mr. Thomas Hutchison,
and published by the Oxford University Press, in two volumes
for four shillings the pair!) There is no reason why you should not
become a modest specialist in Lamb. He is the very man for you;
neither voluminous, nor difficult, nor uncomfortably lofty;
always either amusing or touching; and--most important--
himself passionately addicted to literature. You cannot
like Lamb without liking literature in general. And you cannot
read Lamb without learning about literature in general;
for books were his hobby, and he was a critic of the first rank.
His letters are full of literariness. You will naturally
read his letters; you should not only be infinitely diverted by them
(there are no better epistles), but you should receive from them
much light on the works.


It is a course of study that I am suggesting to you.
It means a certain amount of sustained effort. It means
slightly more resolution, more pertinacity, and more expenditure
of brain-tissue than are required for reading a newspaper.
It means, in fact, "work." Perhaps you did not bargain for work
when you joined me. But I do not think that the literary taste
can be satisfactorily formed unless one is prepared to put
one's back into the affair. And I may prophesy to you,
by way of encouragement, that, in addition to the advantages