Excerpt from The Life of Charles Lamb, Vol. 1 of 2 As the years have passed on, and Charles Lamb, who wrote for antiquity, has become more and more a writer treasured by posterity, the desire to learn of him and his sister all that can be learned - a desire prompted not by curiosity but by affection has steadily increased. It was my aim when I wrote the present biography sixteen years ago to collect and fuse into a single narrative the sum of this scattered information. As in carrying out that task I tried as far as possible to keep the story of Lamb's life in his own and his sister's words and in those of their contemporaries, my part will be found to be less that of author than of stage-manager. Thanks to the good sense of the Lambs' friends in preserving their letters, and to Lamb's own inveterate habit of autobiography the more my character comes to be known, he wrote, the less will my veracity come to be suspected the task was not a very difficult one. In the present edition I have corrected many slips, and have improved the text in a variety of ways. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.