“Prince Dorus” is a pleasant little story in easy verse, telling of a king who fell in love with a great Princess, but was in despair because his love was not requited: 

    “This to the King a courteous Fairy told
    And bade the Monarch in his suit be bold;
    For he that would the charming Princess wed,
    Had only on her cat’s black tail to tread,
    When straight the Spell would vanish into air,
    And he enjoy for life the yielding fair.”

At length he succeeds in this seemingly simple exploit, and in place of the cat there springs up a huge man who foretells that when married the King shall have a son afflicted with a huge nose, a son who shall never be happy in his love: 

    Till he with tears his blemish shall confess
    Discern its odious length and wish it less.

It is a pleasant little story marked with Lamb’s keen sense of humour.

“Beauty and the Beast” is a booklet in verse for young readers.  It was published shortly after “Prince Dorus,” and is believed—­though the evidence as to authorship is inconclusive—­to have been written by Charles or Mary Lamb.  It is a simple rendering in Hudibrastic verse of a familiar nursery story.  Perhaps a very slight piece of evidence in favour of the Lamb authorship may be found in the fact that it shares with “Prince Dorus” the sub-title, “A Poetical Version of an Ancient Tale.”

CRITICISM

In the mid-part of the period during which Charles Lamb was writing, either on his own account or in collaboration with his sister, the books for children to which reference has just been made, he was also engaged upon the work which was to bring him before the world as a great critic, as the first of the Neo-Elizabethans if I may substitute that nickname for the time-honoured one which calls him the last of the Elizabethans.  For us, to-day, with our bountiful acknowledgment of all that we owe to the great body of dramatic poets who flourished during the latter part of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, for us with our many collected editions of the works of these men it is somewhat difficult to realize the benighted condition in which our fellows were situated a century ago.  Elizabethan drama to by far the greater number of our great grandparents meant Shakespeare and Shakespeare alone; to us Shakespeare is only the sun of a great dramatic planetary system, and the corrected view is largely owing to the efforts of one revolutionary critic, and that critic was Charles Lamb.  His earliest letters show that he had revelled in this by-way of literature, and had there found much that was of the best comparatively forgotten, or at least wholly neglected, and he gladly availed himself of an opportunity afforded for selecting striking passages from the English dramatic poets.  “Specimens are becoming fashionable,” he wrote.  “We have ‘Specimens of Ancient English Poets,’