Charles Lamb.  A Memoir. By BARRY CORNWALL.  Boston:  Roberts Brothers.

It is not to any very definable cause that this charming book owes the interest with which it holds the reader throughout.  It can scarcely be said to present the life or character of Lamb in a novel aspect, and even the anecdotic material in which it abounds does not appear altogether fresh.  The very manner in which the subject is treated is that to which we are accustomed:  for who has ever been able to write of Charles Lamb but in a tone of tender and compassionate admiration?

Something, however, better than novelty of matter or method appears in this Memoir, and makes it the best ever written concerning the fine poet, exquisite humorist, and noble man, who it brings nearer than ever to our hearts.  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.  There is no story from which the reader can turn with a higher sense of another’s greatness and goodness, or an humbler sense of his own.

Character and Characteristic Men. By EDWIN P. WHIFFLE.  Boston:  Ticknor and Fields.