Much was to be expected of Mr. Proctor in such a work,
though much would have been forgiven him if he had indulged himself far
more than he has done in an old man's privilege to be garrulous upon old
times and old friends, and had confined himself less strictly to the
life and character illustrative of Lamb's. As it is, there is nothing
concerning any of Lamb's contemporaries that we would willingly lose
from this book. In these sketches of the humorist's friends the subtile
and delightful touches bring out his own nature more clearly, and he
appears in the people who surrounded him hardly less than in his essays
or the events of his career; while Mr. Proctor's long acquaintance with
Lamb becomes the setting to a more careful picture than we have yet had
of his singularly great and unselfish life; and we behold, not a study
of the man in this or that mood only, but a portrait in which his whole
character is seen. The sweetest and gentlest of hosts, moving among his
guests and charming all hearers with his stammered, inimitable
pleasantry; the clerk at his desk at the India House, and finally
released from it into a life of illimitable leisure; the quaint little
scholar of Christ's Hospital; the quaint old humorist taking his long
walks about his beloved London; the author, known and endeared by his
books; the careworn and devoted man, hurrying through the streets with
his maniac sister on his arm, to place her in the shelter of a
mad-house,--it is not some one of these alone, but all of these
together, that we remember, after the perusal of this Memoir, so
graceful in manner, so simple in style, and so thoroughly beautiful and
unaffected in spirit.
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