in verse as well as in prose. His first sonnets are unaffected, well
sustained, and well written.

I do not know much of the opinion of others; but to my thinking the style
of Charles Lamb, in his "Elia," and in the letters written by him in the
later (the last twenty) years of his life, is full of grace; not
antiquated, but having a touch of antiquity. It is self-possessed, choice,
delicate, penetrating, his words running into the innermost sense of
things. It is not, indeed, adapted to the meanest capacity, but is racy,
and chaste, after his fashion. Perhaps it is sometimes scriptural: at all
events it is always earnest and sincere. He was painfully in earnest in
his advocacy of Hazlitt and Hunt, and in his pleadings for Hogarth and the
old dramatists. Even in his humor, his fictitious (as well as his real)
personages have a character of reality about them which gives them their
standard value. They all ring like true coin. In conversation he loved to
discuss persons or books, and seldom ventured upon the stormy sea of
politics; his intimates lying on the two opposite shores, Liberal and
Tory. Yet, when occasion moved him, he did not refuse to express his
liberal opinions. There was little or nothing cloudy or vague about him;
he required that there should be known ground even in fiction. He rejected
the poems of Shelley (many of them so consummately beautiful), because
they were too exclusively ideal. Their efflorescence, he thought, was not
natural. He preferred Southey's "Don Roderick" to his "Curse of Kehama;"
of which latter poem he says, "I don't feel that firm footing in it that I
do in 'Roderick.' My imagination goes sinking and floundering in the vast
spaces of unopened systems and faiths. I am put out of the pale of my old
sympathies."

Charles Lamb had much respect for some of the modern authors. In
particular, he admired (to the full extent of his capacity for liking)