Charles Lamb

"I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple. Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said-for in those young years what was this king of rivers to me hut a stream that watered our pleasant places'?-these are of my oldest recollections." In this manner does Charles Lamb, in an essay that is one of the masterpieces of English prose, open for us those passages of autobiography which happily abound in his writings. The words do more than fix places and dates. They strike the key in which his early life was set-and the later life, hardly less. The genius of Lamb was surely guided into its special channel by the chance that the first fourteen years of his life were passed, as has been said, "between cloister and cloister," between the mediaeval atmosphere of the quiet Temple and that of the busy school of Edward VI.