Charles Lamb

Intimate, ornate and self-deprecating, with affectionate digressions and frequent changes of thought.

Charles Lamb — Elia essays (1823–1833)

• Charles Lamb, writerEssays of Elia and The Last Essays of Elia; public domain
• The familiar essay, traditionthe first-person essay that argues by digression

The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, Project Gutenberg ebook 10343. Four continuous runs quoted unaltered, from the openings of Oxford in the Vacation, Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist and A Chapter on Ears in Elia (1823), and Old China in The Last Essays of Elia (1833).

4 source files, 3,505 words

• Sentences average 16 to 43.4 words.
• Sentence lengths vary by at least 8.4 words — short and long in the same paragraph.
• At least 43% of the words in every 500 are distinct.
• Function words stay within 0.118 of the corpus's own distribution.
• Letter patterns stay within 0.233 of the corpus's.
• 9 phrases are banned outright.
• Anything shorter than 150 words is too small to measure.

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    "leverage",
    "seamless",
    "game-changer",
    "robust",
    "cutting-edge",
    "in today's fast-paced",
    "it's worth noting",
    "at the end of the day"
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name: Charles Lamb — Elia essays (1823–1833)
slug: lamb-elia-essays
corpus:
  consent: public_domain
  author: Charles Lamb
  license: public domain
  samples: 4
  provenance: "The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2: Elia and The Last Essays of Elia, Project Gutenberg ebook 10343. Four continuous runs quoted unaltered, from the openings of Oxford in the Vacation, Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist and A Chapter on Ears in Elia (1823), and Old China in The Last Essays of Elia (1833)."
  files:
    - {file_id: fl-01a086ca-b6b8-75d0-bb7d-aca8034aadf8, source: "Oxford in the Vacation, Essays of Elia (1823)", words: 915}
    - {file_id: fl-01a086ca-bc15-7c20-abf0-292b403de290, source: "Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist, Essays of Elia (1823)", words: 820}
    - {file_id: fl-01a086ca-c0b6-7313-a0e7-de17d01bec67, source: "A Chapter on Ears, Essays of Elia (1823)", words: 869}
    - {file_id: fl-01a086ca-c5db-7990-9da1-097e621a39f0, source: "Old China, The Last Essays of Elia (1833)", words: 901}
---

# Charles Lamb — Elia essays (1823–1833)

The familiar essay. A first person admits something small at the start and follows the digression until the digression has become the argument. People arrive through one sentence of their own speech and are then circled. The prose is ornate, self-interrupting, and affectionate about what it mocks.

## Never

- Never states the moral
- Never resolves the digression
- Never mocks without affection
- Never hurries a sentence to its end

## Gold standard samples

Each numbered entry is one complete corpus passage, quoted as it stands.

1. Source: Oxford in the Vacation, Essays of Elia (1823), 915 words.

   Casting a preparatory glance at the bottom of this article--as the
   wary connoisseur in prints, with cursory eye (which, while it reads,
   seems as though it read not,) never fails to consult the _quis
   sculpsit_ in the corner, before he pronounces some rare piece to be a
   Vivares, or a Woollet--methinks I hear you exclaim, Reader, _Who is
   Elia?_

   Because in my last I tried to divert thee with some half-forgotten
   humours of some old clerks defunct, in an old house of business, long
   since gone to decay, doubtless you have already set me down in your
   mind as one of the self-same college--a votary of the desk--a notched
   and cropt scrivener--one that sucks his sustenance, as certain sick
   people are said to do, through a quill.

   Well, I do agnize something of the sort. I confess that it is my
   humour, my fancy--in the forepart of the day, when the mind of your
   man of letters requires some relaxation--(and none better than such
   as at first sight seems most abhorrent from his beloved studies)--to
   while away some good hours of my time in the contemplation of indigos,
   cottons, raw silks, piece-goods, flowered or otherwise. In the first
   place ******* and then it sends you home with such increased appetite
   to your books ***** not to say, that your outside sheets, and waste
   wrappers of foolscap, do receive into them, most kindly and naturally,
   the impression of sonnets, epigrams, _essays_--so that the very
   parings of a counting-house are, in some sort, the settings up of an
   author. The enfranchised quill, that has plodded all the morning among
   the cart-rucks of figures and cyphers, frisks and curvets so at its
   ease over the flowery carpet-ground of a midnight dissertation.--It
   feels its promotion. ***** So that you see, upon the whole, the
   literary dignity of _Elia_ is very little, if at all, compromised in
   the condescension.

   Not that, in my anxious detail of the many commodities incidental
   to the life of a public office, I would be thought blind to certain
   flaws, which a cunning carper might be able to pick in this Joseph's
   vest. And here I must have leave, in the fulness of my soul, to regret
   the abolition, and doing-away-with altogether, of those consolatory
   interstices, and sprinklings of freedom, through the four
   seasons,--the _red-letter days_, now become, to all intents and
   purposes, _dead-letter days_. There was Paul, and Stephen, and
   Barnabas--

     Andrew and John, men famous in old times

   --we were used to keep all their days holy, as long back as I was at
   school at Christ's. I remember their effigies, by the same token,
   in the old _Baskett_ Prayer Book. There hung Peter in his uneasy
   posture--holy Bartlemy in the troublesome act of flaying, after the
   famous Marsyas by Spagnoletti.--I honoured them all, and could almost
   have wept the defalcation of Iscariot--so much did we love to keep
   holy memories sacred:--only methought I a little grudged at the
   coalition of the _better Jude_ with Simon-clubbing (as it were) their
   sanctities together, to make up one poor gaudy-day between them--as an
   economy unworthy of the dispensation.

   These were bright visitations in a scholar's and a clerk's life--"far
   off their coming shone."--I was as good as an almanac in those days.
   I could have told you such a saint's-day falls out next week, or the
   week after. Peradventure the Epiphany, by some periodical infelicity,
   would, once in six years, merge in a Sabbath. Now am I little better
   than one of the profane. Let me not be thought to arraign the wisdom
   of my civil superiors, who have judged the further observation of
   these holy tides to be papistical, superstitious.

   Only in a custom of such long standing, methinks, if their Holinesses
   the Bishops had, in decency, been first sounded--but I am wading out
   of my depths. I am not the man to decide the limits of civil and
   ecclesiastical authority--I am plain Elia--no Selden, nor Archbishop
   Usher--though at present in the thick of their books, here in the
   heart of learning, under the shadow of the mighty Bodley.

   I can here play the gentleman, enact the student. To such a one as
   myself, who has been defrauded in his young years of the sweet food of
   academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant, to while away a few idle
   weeks at, as one or other of the Universities. Their vacation, too, at
   this time of the year, falls in so pat with _ours_. Here I can take
   my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree or standing I
   please. I seem admitted _ad eundem_. I fetch up past opportunities.
   I can rise at the chapel-bell, and dream that it rings for _me_. In
   moods of humility I can be a Sizar, or a Servitor. When the peacock
   vein rises, I strut a Gentleman Commoner. In graver moments, I
   proceed Master of Arts. Indeed I do not think I am much unlike
   that respectable character. I have seen your dim-eyed vergers, and
   bed-makers in spectacles, drop a bow or curtsy, as I pass, wisely
   mistaking me for something of the sort. I go about in black, which
   favours the notion. Only in Christ Church reverend quadrangle, I can
   be content to pass for nothing short of a Seraphic Doctor.

2. Source: Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist, Essays of Elia (1823), 820 words.

   "A clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game." This was
   the celebrated _wish_ of old Sarah Battle (now with God) who, next
   to her devotions, loved a good game at whist. She was none of your
   lukewarm gamesters, your half and half players, who have no objection
   to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber; who affirm that
   they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game,
   and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at
   a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will
   desire an adversary, who has slipt a wrong card, to take it up and
   play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table.
   One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said,
   that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them.

   Sarah Battle was none of that breed. She detested them, as I do, from
   her heart and soul; and would not, save upon a striking emergency,
   willingly seat herself at the same table with them. She loved a
   thorough-paced partner, a determined enemy. She took, and gave,
   no concessions. She hated favours. She never made a revoke, nor
   ever passed it over in her adversary without exacting the utmost
   forfeiture. She fought a good fight: cut and thrust. She held not her
   good sword (her cards) "like a dancer." She sate bolt upright; and
   neither showed you her cards, nor desired to see yours. All people
   have their blind side--their superstitions; and I have heard her
   declare, under the rose, that Hearts was her favourite suit.

   I never in my life--and I knew Sarah Battle many of the best years of
   it--saw her take out her snuff-box when it was her turn to play; or
   snuff a candle in the middle of a game; or ring for a servant, till it
   was fairly over. She never introduced, or connived at, miscellaneous
   conversation during its process. As she emphatically observed,
   cards were cards: and if I ever saw unmingled distaste in her fine
   last-century countenance, it was at the airs of a young gentleman of a
   literary turn, who had been with difficulty persuaded to take a hand;
   and who, in his excess of candour, declared, that he thought there was
   no harm in unbending the mind now and then, after serious studies,
   in recreations of that kind! She could not bear to have her noble
   occupation, to which she wound up her faculties, considered in that
   light. It was her business, her duty, the thing she came into the
   world to do,--and she did it. She unbent her mind afterwards--over a
   book.

   Pope was her favourite author: his Rape of the Lock her favourite
   work. She once did me the favour to play over with me (with the cards)
   his celebrated game of Ombre in that poem; and to explain to me how
   far it agreed with, and in what points it would be found to differ
   from, tradrille. Her illustrations were apposite and poignant; and I
   had the pleasure of sending the substance of them to Mr. Bowles: but
   I suppose they came too late to be inserted among his ingenious notes
   upon that author.

   Quadrille, she has often told me, was her first love; but whist
   had engaged her maturer esteem. The former, she said, was showy
   and specious, and likely to allure young persons. The uncertainty
   and quick shifting of partners--a thing which the constancy of
   whist abhors;--the dazzling supremacy and regal investiture of
   Spadille--absurd, as she justly observed, in the pure aristocracy of
   whist, where his crown and garter give him no proper power above his
   brother-nobility of the Aces;--the giddy vanity, so taking to the
   inexperienced, of playing alone:--above all, the overpowering
   attractions of a _Sans Prendre Vole_,--to the triumph of which there
   is certainly nothing parallel or approaching, in the contingencies of
   whist;--all these, she would say, make quadrille a game of captivation
   to the young and enthusiastic. But whist was the _solider_ game:
   that was her word. It was a long meal; not, like quadrille, a feast
   of snatches. One or two rubbers might coextend in duration with an
   evening. They gave time to form rooted friendships, to cultivate
   steady enmities. She despised the chance-started, capricious, and ever
   fluctuating alliances of the other. The skirmishes of quadrille, she
   would say, reminded her of the petty ephemeral embroilments of the
   little Italian states, depicted by Machiavel; perpetually changing
   postures and connexions; bitter foes to-day, sugared darlings
   to-morrow; kissing and scratching in a breath;--but the wars of
   whist were comparable to the long, steady, deep-rooted, rational,
   antipathies of the great French and English nations.

3. Source: A Chapter on Ears, Essays of Elia (1823), 869 words.

   I have no ear.--

   Mistake me not, reader,--nor imagine that I am by nature destitute
   of those exterior twin appendages, hanging ornaments, and
   (architecturally speaking) handsome volutes to the human capital.
   Better my mother had never borne me.--I am, I think, rather delicately
   than copiously provided with those conduits; and I feel no disposition
   to envy the mule for his plenty, or the mole for her exactness,
   in those ingenious labyrinthine inlets--those indispensable
   side-intelligencers.

   Neither have I incurred, or done any thing to incur, with Defoe,
   that hideous disfigurement, which constrained him to draw upon
   assurance--to feel "quite unabashed," and at ease upon that article.
   I was never, I thank my stars, in the pillory; nor, if I read them
   aright, is it within the compass of my destiny, that I ever should be.

   When therefore I say that I have no ear, you will understand me
   to mean--_for music_.--To say that this heart never melted at the
   concourse of sweet sounds, would be a foul self-libel.--"_Water
   parted from the sea_" never fails to move it strangely. So does "_In
   Infancy_." But they were used to be sung at her harpsichord (the
   old-fashioned instrument in vogue in those days) by a gentlewoman--the
   gentlest, sure, that ever merited the appellation--the sweetest--why
   should I hesitate to name Mrs. S----, once the blooming Fanny
   Weatheral of the Temple--who had power to thrill the soul of Elia,
   small imp as he was, even in his long coats; and to make him glow,
   tremble, and blush with a passion, that not faintly indicated the
   day-spring of that absorbing sentiment, which was afterwards destined
   to overwhelm and subdue his nature quite, for Alice W----n.

   I even think that _sentimentally_ I am disposed to harmony. But
   _organically_ I am incapable of a tune. I have been practising "_God
   save the King_" all my life; whistling and humming of it over to
   myself in solitary corners; and am not yet arrived, they tell me,
   within many quavers of it. Yet hath the loyalty of Elia never been
   impeached.

   I am not without suspicion, that I have an undeveloped faculty of
   music within me. For, thrumming, in my wild way, on my friend A.'s
   piano, the other morning, while he was engaged in an adjoining
   parlour,--on his return he was pleased to say, "_he thought it could
   not be the maid_!" On his first surprise at hearing the keys touched
   in somewhat an airy and masterful way, not dreaming of me, his
   suspicions had lighted on _Jenny_. But a grace, snatched from a
   superior refinement, soon convinced him that some being,--technically
   perhaps deficient, but higher informed from a principle common to all
   the fine arts,--had swayed the keys to a mood which Jenny, with all
   her (less-cultivated) enthusiasm, could never have elicited from them.
   I mention this as a proof of my friend's penetration, and not with any
   view of disparaging Jenny.

   Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet have I taken
   some pains) what a note in music is; or how one note should differ
   from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a
   tenor. Only sometimes the thorough bass I contrive to guess at, from
   its being supereminently harsh and disagreeable. I tremble, however,
   for my misapplication of the simplest terms of _that_ which I
   disclaim. While I profess my ignorance, I scarce know what to _say_ I
   am ignorant of I hate, perhaps, by misnomers. _Sostenuto_ and _adagio_
   stand in the like relation of obscurity to me; and _Sol_, _Fa_, _Mi_,
   _Re_, is as conjuring as _Baralipton_.

   It is hard to stand alone--in an age like this,--(constituted to the
   quick and critical perception of all harmonious combinations, I verily
   believe, beyond all preceding ages, since Jubal stumbled upon the
   gamut)--to remain, as it were, singly unimpressible to the magic
   influences of an art, which is said to have such an especial stroke at
   soothing, elevating, and refining the passions.--Yet rather than break
   the candid current of my confessions, I must avow to you, that I have
   received a great deal more pain than pleasure from this so cried-up
   faculty.

   I am constitutionally susceptible of noises. A carpenter's hammer, in
   a warm summer noon, will fret me into more than midsummer madness. But
   those unconnected, unset sounds are nothing to the measured malice of
   music. The ear is passive to those single strokes; willingly enduring
   stripes, while it hath no task to con. To music it cannot be passive.
   It will strive--mine at least will--'spite of its inaptitude, to thrid
   the maze; like an unskilled eye painfully poring upon hieroglyphics.
   I have sat through an Italian Opera, till, for sheer pain, and
   inexplicable anguish, I have rushed out into the noisiest places of
   the crowded streets, to solace myself with sounds, which I was not
   obliged to follow, and get rid of the distracting torment of endless,
   fruitless, barren attention! I take refuge in the unpretending
   assemblage of honest common-life sounds;--and the purgatory of the
   Enraged Musician becomes my paradise.

4. Source: Old China, The Last Essays of Elia (1833), 901 words.

   I have an almost feminine partiality for old china. When I go to see
   any great house, I inquire for the china-closet, and next for the
   picture gallery. I cannot defend the order of preference, but by
   saying, that we have all some taste or other, of too ancient a date
   to admit of our remembering distinctly that it was an acquired one. I
   can call to mind the first play, and the first exhibition, that I was
   taken to; but I am not conscious of a time when china jars and saucers
   were introduced into my imagination.

   I had no repugnance then--why should I now have?--to those little,
   lawless, azure-tinctured grotesques, that under the notion of men and
   women, float about, uncircumscribed by any element, in that world
   before perspective--a china tea-cup.

   I like to see my old friends--whom distance cannot diminish--figuring
   up in the air (so they appear to our optics), yet on _terra firma_
   still--for so we must in courtesy interpret that speck of deeper blue,
   which the decorous artist, to prevent absurdity, has made to spring up
   beneath their sandals.

   I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if possible, with
   still more womanish expressions.

   Here is a young and courtly Mandarin, handing tea to a lady from a
   salver--two miles off. See how distance seems to set off respect!
   And here the same lady, or another--for likeness is identity on
   tea-cups--is stepping into a little fairy boat, moored on the hither
   side of this calm garden river, with a dainty mincing foot, which in a
   right angle of incidence (as angles go in our world) must infallibly
   land her in the midst of a flowery mead--a furlong off on the other
   side of the same strange stream!

   Farther on--if far or near can be predicated of their world--see
   horses, trees, pagodas, dancing the hays.

   Here--a cow and rabbit couchant, and co-extensive--so objects show,
   seen through the lucid atmosphere of fine Cathay.

   I was pointing out to my cousin last evening, over our Hyson (which we
   are old fashioned enough to drink unmixed still of an afternoon) some
   of these _speciosa miracula_ upon a set of extraordinary old blue
   china (a recent purchase) which we were now for the first time using;
   and could not help remarking, how favourable circumstances had been
   to us of late years, that we could afford to please the eye sometimes
   with trifles of this sort--when a passing sentiment seemed to
   over-shade the brows of my companion. I am quick at detecting these
   summer clouds in Bridget.

   "I wish the good old times would come again," she said, "when we were
   not quite so rich. I do not mean, that I want to be poor; but there
   was a middle state;"--so she was pleased to ramble on,--"in which I am
   sure we were a great deal happier. A purchase is but a purchase, now
   that you have money enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a
   triumph. When we coveted a cheap luxury (and, O! how much ado I had to
   get you to consent in those times!) we were used to have a debate two
   or three days before, and to weigh the _for_ and _against_, and think
   what we might spare it out of, and what saving we could hit upon, that
   should be an equivalent. A thing was worth buying then, when we felt
   the money that we paid for it.

   "Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till
   all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread-bare--and all
   because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher, which you dragged home
   late at night from Barker's in Covent-garden? Do you remember how we
   eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase,
   and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of
   the Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing you
   should be too late--and when the old bookseller with some grumbling
   opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting
   bedwards) lighted out the relic from his dusty treasures--and when
   you lugged it home, wishing it were twice as cumbersome--and when you
   presented it to me--and when we were exploring the perfectness of it
   (_collating_ you called it)--and while I was repairing some of the
   loose leaves with paste, which your impatience would not suffer to be
   left till day-break--was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can
   those neat black clothes which you wear now, and are so careful to
   keep brushed, since we have become rich and finical, give you half
   the honest vanity, with which you flaunted it about in that over-worn
   suit--your old corbeau--for four or five weeks longer than you should
   have done, to pacify your conscience for the mighty sum of fifteen--or
   sixteen shillings was it?--a great affair we thought it then--which
   you had lavished on the old folio. Now you can afford to buy any book
   that pleases you, but I do not see that you ever bring me home any
   nice old purchases now.

## Signature vocabulary

Reach for these:

- the dash
- the semicolon
- archaic and Latinate diction
- direct address to the reader
- the diminutive

These 4 habits identify the register faster than anything else:

- the first sentence admits something against the writer
- a person arrives through a line of their own speech
- dashes carry the interruptions instead of ending them
- the essay closes on its smallest object

Words and constructions this voice refuses:

delve, leverage, seamless, game-changer, robust, cutting-edge, in today's fast-paced, it's worth noting, at the end of the day.

## Moves

- Open on an admission against oneself
- Introduce a person through a line of their own
- Interrupt the sentence with a dash and carry the thought through it
- Let the digression become the subject
- End on the smallest thing in the essay

## Register

- essay: ornate and digressive, first person
- portrait: the person's own words before any description of them
- reverie: the tense slips and the slip stands

## Measured fingerprint

Measured over 4 passages and 3505 words. Sentence means run from 22.9 to 32.2 words, with a standard deviation inside each passage of 15.3 to 29.9, so the length varies as much as it averages. Windowed type-token ratio over 500 words sits between 0.54 and 0.59. Per thousand words the corpus carries 10.0 semicolons, 2.0 exclamation marks and 0.9 of the fourteen connectives the checker counts (however, moreover, thus and the rest). The commonest sentence openers are i (34), she (14), the (5), it (5), but (5).

Write to these numbers. The checker below reads them from the corpus and
applies them to anything written in this voice.

```json
{
  "schema": "katagami:voice-bands/v1",
  "sentence_length": {
    "mean": [
      16.0,
      43.4
    ],
    "stdev_min": 8.4
  },
  "banned_phrases": [
    "delve",
    "leverage",
    "seamless",
    "game-changer",
    "robust",
    "cutting-edge",
    "in today's fast-paced",
    "it's worth noting",
    "at the end of the day"
  ],
  "punctuation": {
    "exclamations_per_1000_words": [
      0,
      10
    ]
  },
  "type_token_ratio": {
    "min": 0.43,
    "window_words": 500
  },
  "function_words": {
    "max_distance": 0.118
  },
  "char_trigrams": {
    "max_distance": 0.233
  },
  "min_words_to_evaluate": 150
}
```

## Corpus

The full text of every passage above:

- Passage 1: /api/file/fl-01a086ca-b6b8-75d0-bb7d-aca8034aadf8 (Oxford in the Vacation, Essays of Elia (1823), 915 words)
- Passage 2: /api/file/fl-01a086ca-bc15-7c20-abf0-292b403de290 (Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist, Essays of Elia (1823), 820 words)
- Passage 3: /api/file/fl-01a086ca-c0b6-7313-a0e7-de17d01bec67 (A Chapter on Ears, Essays of Elia (1823), 869 words)
- Passage 4: /api/file/fl-01a086ca-c5db-7990-9da1-097e621a39f0 (Old China, The Last Essays of Elia (1833), 901 words)