SOURCE: Wordsworth, Jonathan. “Elia: An Introduction.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s., 78 (April 1992): 202-206.

In the following essay, Wordsworth briefly surveys the traits of Lamb's literary persona, Elia.

Then there is Charles Lamb, a long way from his friend Hazlitt in ways and manners; he is very fond of snuff, which seems to sharpen up his wit every time he dips his plentiful fingers into his large bronze-coloured box, and then he … throws himself backwards on his chair and stammers at a joke or pun with an inward sort of utterance ere he can give it speech. …

Back in Helpstone after his 1824 visit to London, John Clare is recalling the literary scene. Hazlitt ‘sits a silent picture of severity’, now and then intervening ‘with a sneer that cuts a bad pun or a young author's maiden table-talk to atoms’. Lamb, by contrast, is ‘a good sort of fellow...