author of the “Anatomy of Melancholy,” but these, not unnaturally, being adjudged unsuitable for a daily newspaper found a place in the “John Woodvil” volume of 1802.  Yet it was in the journal named that on 1st February, 1802, appeared a brief Essay in the form of a letter on “The Londoner.”  In this essay we have Lamb using the same phrases that he had employed a year earlier in writing to Wordsworth.  In 1811-14 Lamb was contributing essays (including “On the Inconveniences Resulting from Being Hanged,” “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital,” and on “The Melancholy of Tailors”) to Leigh Hunt’s “Reflector,” to the “Gentleman’s Magazine,” and the “Champion.”  Eight of these essays were included in the two volume “Works” of 1818.

It was with the establishment of the “London Magazine” in 1820 that, as has been said, Lamb’s great opportunity came and was greatly taken.  The magazine began, as we have seen, in January, and the editor soon gathered around him a remarkably brilliant body of contributors.  To their number in August was added “Elia,” whose modest signature—­later to become perhaps the most widely-known pen-name in our literature—­was appended to an article on “The South Sea House.”  Thenceforward—­with the occasional missing of a month here or there, balanced by other months presenting two—­the essays appeared with such regularity that twenty-eight months later there were twenty-seven of the twenty-eight essays which were gathered into the volume published in 1823 as “The Essays of Elia.”

The publication of the essays in volume form did not by any means indicate that the author had worked out his vein; indeed, while the book was passing through the press he was writing other essays for the “London,” though not with the same regularity; afterwards he contributed to the “New Monthly” and other magazines.  Such of this later work as he chose to preserve formed “The Last Essays of Elia,” published ten years after the earlier work.

LETTERS

All through his working life as man of letters Lamb was engaged in manifesting that side of his genius which whilst known to but few persons during his lifetime was to be one of those most widely and most lovingly known afterwards.  He was of the greatest of our letter-writers.  It was perhaps but another aspect of the essayist—­or rather we might say that his work as essayist was the crowning development of his sedulous habit of being himself when communing on paper with his intimate friends.  It has been suggested that such finished works as are many of Lamb’s letters were, so to speak, built up bit by bit, and then copied as completed wholes before being despatched to those for whom they were designed.  Whether written with a running pen, as a large proportion of them undoubtedly were, or written with the patience of the essayist ponderingly in search of the mot juste, they are always true Lamb, individual expressions far removed from the ordinary letters of ordinary folk; they are at once informing revelations of the writer in his relations with his fellows, and they are always marked by essentially literary qualities.  In his letters will be found not infrequently—­both in idea and in expression—­the germs of his essays.