“Witches and Other Night Fears” is an examination, in which whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several years of his early childhood, though he holds that “It is not book, or picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these terrors in children.  They can at most but give them direction.”  He suggests that the kind of fear is purely spiritual, and incidentally gives a characteristically quaint turn in “My night-fancies have long ceased to be afflictive.  I confess an occasional nightmare; but I do not, as in early youth, keep a stud of them.”

In “My Relations” we have an excellent instance of Lamb’s veiled autobiography; he begins by saying that he has no brother or sister and at once proceeds to a close and analytical portrait of his “cousin,” James Elia, that supposed personage being Charles Lamb’s own brother John, who died in November, 1821, a few months after the original appearance of this essay.  “Mackery End in Hertfordshire,” continues the theme of relations with another striking piece of portraiture in another supposed cousin of Elia’s, Bridget (really Mary Lamb).  In limning his sister he was of course hampered somewhat by her terrible affliction, but wonderfully has he surmounted it, and delightful indeed it is to follow the narrative of the “cousins’” visit to unknown cousins at the old place in “the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.”

Dealing with the subject of “Modern Gallantry” Elia shows how it is wanting in the true spirit of gallantry which should consist not in compliments to youth and beauty but in reverence to sex.

“The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple” is one of the essays richest at once in personal recollections, in wonderful portraiture, and in those subtle literary touches which impart their peculiar flavour to the whole.  A sketch of the author’s father as Lovel was quoted from this essay in the opening chapter.  Elia’s observation, his felicity of expression, his originality of thought, a hint of his playfulness, may all be recognized in the very commencement of this delicious essay: 

I was born, and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple.  Its church, its halls, its gardens, its fountain, its river, I had almost said—­for in those young years, what was this king of rivers to me but a stream that watered our pleasant places?—­these are my oldest recollections.  I repeat, to this day, no verses to myself more frequently, or with kindlier emotion, than those of Spenser, where he speaks of this spot: 

          “There when they came, whereas those bricky towers,
          The which on Themmes brode aged back doth ride,
          Where now the studious lawyers have their bowers,
          There whylome wont the Templar knights to bide,
          Till they decayd through pride.”