The Best Letters of Charles Lamb

Charles Lambs stammering speech, his gaiter-clad legs, --"almost immaterial legs", Hood called them, --his frail wisp of a body, topped by a head "worthy of Aristotle", his love of punning, of the Indian weed, and, alas! of the kindly production of the juniper-berry (he was not, he owned, "constellated under Aquarius"), his antiquarianism of taste, and relish of the crotchets and whimsies of authorship, are as familiar to us almost as they were to the group he gathered round him Wednesdays at No. 4, Inner Temple Lane, where "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigor of the game" awaited them. Talfourd has unctuously celebrated Lamb's "Wednesday Nights". He has kindly left ajar a door through which posterity peeps in upon the company, --Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, "Barry Cornwall", Godwin, Martin Burney, Crabb Robinson (a ubiquitous shade, dimly suggestive of that figment, "Mrs. Harris"), Charles Kemble, Fanny Kelly ("Barbara S". ), on red-letter occasions Coleridge and Wordsworth, --and sees them discharging the severer offices of the whist-table ("cards were cards" then), and, later, unbending their minds over poetry, criticism, and metaphysics.