SOURCE: Perry, Seamus. “Charles Lamb and the Cost of Seriousness.” The Charles Lamb Bulletin, no. 83 (July 1993): 78-89.

In the following essay, originally delivered as a lecture, Perry evaluates Lamb's ironic and idiosyncratic approach to comedy and seriousness in his Elian essays.

It is a great honour and pleasure to address the Charles Lamb Society; and I am both pleased and surprised by my invitation. Pleased, because it finally forced me to fulfil a promise I had made myself repeatedly for a long time, which was attentively to read again the Elia essays; and surprised, because, as that self-made promise will indicate, I am not a Lambian—Lamb is not, in the brutal terminology of the young aspirant academic, my ‘specialty’. I hardly have the gall to advertise myself to you as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’, for that would carry the quite unwarranted implication that yours are jaded...