essay of elia summary

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Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb – review

A humble clerk with the East India Company for much of his life, Charles Lamb (1775-1834) came into his own writing essays "under the phantom cloud of Elia". This assumed name, borrowed from another clerk, enabled him to put the full resources of his wit at the service of a form to which he was temperamentally suited, and made his own.

Tragic domestic circumstances bound Charles to his sister Mary, with whom he lived "in a sort of double singleness", after she stabbed their mother to death in a fit of madness. Contrasting his tastes in reading with those of his sister, who "must have a story – well, ill, or indifferently told", Lamb confides that "out-of-the-way humours and opinion – heads with some diverting twist in them – the oddities of authorship please me most". Montaigne, whose presence hovers over the Essays of Elia (1823), would have approved.

Lamb's nimble, cadenced prose, with its occasional antiquated turn of phrase, exhibits the same curious mixture of erudition and colloquialism, of seriousness and jest, as that of his French predecessor. For his unruly "little sketches", Lamb, like Montaigne, quarries his own experience, his circle of acquaintances and relatives thinly disguised beneath initials and pseudonyms, just like Elia himself.

Evoked with rare sensuality, the minutiae of everyday life – a card game in "Mrs Battle's Opinions on Whist", the ritual of saying "Grace Before Meat", the perils of lending books in "The Two Races of Men" – are all grist to his mill. Essays of Elia certainly lends itself to repeated reading, and when Lamb's popularity was at its height, his Victorian and Edwardian readers could recite entire passages. Thanks to this elegant new Hesperus edition, Charles Lamb's forgotten masterpiece is ripe for rediscovery.

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9 Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity

Published: September 2020
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Charles Lamb helped develop the familiar essay genre through his Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays (1833). Highly popular through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he faded from view through the twentieth century thanks to New Critical scorn. This chapter restores the Elian voice to contemporary conversations about the essay, tracing Lamb’s influence and afterlives in the work of later writers from Anne Fadiman to David Foster Wallace. More broadly, the chapter uses Lamb to open up the many nuances of the familiar essay, and to trace its origins and debts. From conversation to letter-writing to the work of the Romantic poets and the strange persona of Elia himself, it explores the many meanings and histories of the familiar mode.

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University of Iowa Press

Essays of elia.

Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of “Elia” allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination. The resulting essays touch upon a wide range of compelling subjects from the deliciously humorous “Dissertation upon Roast Pig” to the poignantly reflective “New Year's Eve.” Yet collectively they also comprise a fascinating personal memoir, veiled under the pseudonymous disguise of Elia. Now back in print with a new foreword by the distinguished personal essayist Phillip Lopate and with useful annotations, Essays of Elia will provide a delicious stylistic treat for all readers.

“. . . one of the classics of English prose and a cornerstone of the personal essay tradition. All personal essayists worth their salt owe a huge debt to this generous and generative collection. . . ; all apprentice essayists who would strive to make headway in the form will need to read it. . . . Essays of Elia is not only an essential text, but a near-buried treasure, an all-but-lost masterpiece in our contemporary culture.” — Phillip Lopate

Publication Details

The Made-Up Self

Memoirs of a revolutionary.

CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FIFTY-ONE. BY HENRY MEYER.

From the original painting at the India Office, reproduced by permission of the Secretary of State for India in Council.

Bell's Miniature Series of Great Writers

Charles lamb, walter jerrold.

GEORGE BELL & SONS

Table of contents, list of illustrations, the story of his life.

Charles Lamb's biography should be read at length in his essays and his letters—from them we get to know not only the facts of his life but almost insensibly we get a knowledge of the man himself such as cannot be conveyed in any brief summary. He is as a friend, a loved friend, whom it seems almost sacrilegious to summarize in the compact sentences of a biographical dictionary, of whom it would be a wrong to write if the writing were to be used instead of, rather than as an introduction to, a literary self-portrait, more striking it may be believed than any of the canvases in the Uffizi Gallery. When he was six-and-twenty Charles Lamb wrote thus in reply to an invitation from Wordsworth to visit him in Cumberland:

I have passed all my days in London ... the lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street; the innumerable trades, tradesmen and customers, coaches, waggons, playhouses; all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden; the very women of the town; the watchmen, drunken scenes, [10] rattles; life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night; the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street; the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomimes—London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind, and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life. All these emotions must be strange to you; so are your rural emotions to me. But consider, what must I have been doing all my life, not to have lent great portions of my heart with usury to such scenes?

In whimsical exaggeration Lamb sometimes wrote of his aversion from country sights and sounds, adopting that method partly perhaps for the purpose of rallying his correspondents, and partly for the purpose of accentuating his own "unrural notions." He was a Londoner of Londoners. In London he was born and educated, and in London—with a few of his later years in what is now but an outer suburb—he passed the fifty-nine years of his life. Beyond some childish holidays in pleasant Hertfordshire, a few brief trips into the country—to Coleridge at Stowey and at Keswick, to Oxford and Cambridge, and one short journey to Paris—he had no personal contact with the outer world. He delighted in his devotion to London, and stands pre-eminent as the Londoner in literature. [11]

Charles Lamb was the son of John Lamb, who had left his native Lincolnshire—probably from the neighbourhood of Stamford—as a child, and who finally found himself attached to one Samuel Salt, a Bencher of the Inner Temple, in the capacity of "his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer." Salt's chambers were at 2, Crown Office Row, and there John Lamb lived with a family consisting of himself, his wife, an unmarried sister, Sarah Lamb ("Aunt Hetty"), a son John, aged twelve, and a daughter Mary, aged eleven, when on 10th February, 1775, there was born to him another son to whom was given the now familiar name. Seven children had been born from 1762 to 1775, but of them all these three alone survived. The father and his employer are sketched, unforgetably, in Lamb's essay on "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple," Salt, under his own name, and Lamb under that of Lovel: "I knew this Lovel. He was a man of an incorrigible and losing honesty. A good fellow withal and 'would strike.' In the cause of the oppressed he never considered inequalities, or calculated the number of his opponents." The whole passage must be read in the essay itself. From his father Charles Lamb inherited at once his literary leanings and his humour, both heightened to an incalculable degree. We have Elia's word for it that John Lamb the elder "was the liveliest little fellow breathing" with a face as gay as Garrick's, and we know further that he pub [12] lished a small volume of simple verse. From the father, too, the family derived a heavier inheritance, which was to cast its shadow over their lives from the day of Charles's early manhood to the day half a century later, when his sister Mary, the last survivor of the family circle, was laid to rest.

Lamb's mother, Elizabeth Field, is—for obvious reasons—the only member of the immediate family circle whom we do not meet in his writings. His maternal grandmother—the grandame who is to be met in his verses and in some of his essays—was for over half a century housekeeper at Blakesware in Hertfordshire, and with her, as a small boy, Charles spent pleasant holidays.

Little Charles Lamb was sent for a time to "a humble day-school, at which reading and writing were taught to us boys in the morning, and the same slender erudition was communicated to the girls, our sisters, etc., in the evening." In a letter to Coleridge (5th July, 1796) we have a hint that Lamb may have had yet earlier teaching in an infant school in the Temple for he writes: "Mr. Chambers lived in the Temple; Mrs. Reynolds, his daughter, was my schoolmistress"; though it may be that the lady referred to was employed in Mr. Bird's school. This school, kept by William Bird "in the passage leading from Fetter Lane into Bartlett's Buildings," was the one to which Mary Lamb appears to have owed her regular training; but Samuel Salt had a goodly collection of old books [13] in his chambers, and among these the brother and sister browsed most profitably, to use his own expressive word, acquiring an early liking for good literature and learning to take their best recreation in things of the mind. But if from the "school room looking into a discoloured dingy garden" Mary Lamb was presumed to be able to acquire a sufficiency of knowledge, it was seen that her younger brother needed something more than Mr. Bird could give to fit him for a life in which he would have to take an early place as bread-winner. John Lamb's friendly employer—whom lovers of Lamb can never recall but to honour—secured a nomination for the boy to Christ's Hospital, and thither in his eighth year the little fellow was transferred from the home in the Temple.

Should a zealous compiler seek to arrange an autobiography of Charles Lamb from his writings he would not have a difficult task, and he would find two delightful essays devoted to the famous school—so long the distinguishing feature of Newgate Street—where "blue-coat boys" passed the most importantly formative period of their lives. Handicapped somewhat by a stuttering speech Charles Lamb did not perhaps join in all the boyish sports of his fellows, though there are many testimonies to the regard in which he was held by his school-mates, and the fact is stressed that though the only one of his surname at Christ's Hospital, he was never "Lamb" but always "Charles Lamb," as though there were something of an endearment in the constant use [14] of his Christian name. "The Christ's Hospital or Blue-coat boy, has a distinctive character of his own, as far removed from the abject qualities of a common charity-boy as it is from the disgusting forwardness of a lad brought up at some other of the public schools." In the essay from which this is quoted, Charles Lamb, looking back a quarter of a century after leaving the old foundation, summed up the characteristics of his school as reflected in the character of its boys of whom he and the close friend he made there are the two whose names are the most commonly on the lips of men. It is, indeed, worthy of remark that from amid the countless boys educated at Christ's Hospital since it was founded three centuries and a half ago by "the flower of the Tudor name ... boy patron of boys," the names that stand out most prominently are those of the two who were at the school together—Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It was at that old "Hospital," recently, alas, demolished, that these men, so different in genius, so similar in many of their intellectual tastes, began a memorable friendship that was only to be broken by death more than half a century later.

A schoolfellow's description of him may help us to visualize the elusive figure of which we have no early portraits, and the later portraits of which are understood to be wanting in one regard or another. His countenance, says this early observer, was mild; his complexion clear brown, with an expression that might lead you to [15] think that he was of Jewish descent. His eyes were not each of the same colour: one was hazel, the other had specks of grey in the iris, mingled as we see red spots in the bloodstone. His step was plantigrade, which made his walk slow and peculiar, adding to the staid appearance of his figure.

For seven years—from October 1782 until November 1789—Charles Lamb remained at Christ's Hospital, and then, close upon fifteen years of age, returned to his parents in the Temple. His brother John had obtained an appointment in the South Sea House, probably through the kindly offices of Samuel Salt, who was a Deputy-Governor, and at some unascertained date between 1789 and 1792, Charles found employment in the same office; not, however, for long, for in April of 1792 he was appointed clerk in the accountant's office of the East India House, at a commencing salary of £70 per annum. This same year which thus saw the founding of Charles Lamb's humble fortunes, saw also the beginning of the break-up of his home, for the immortal old Bencher, Samuel Salt, died, and the Lamb family was left without its mainstay. John Lamb the elder was past work, already, we may believe, passing into senility; and John Lamb the younger, who appears to have been prospering in the South Sea House, had presumably set up his bachelor home elsewhere. Salt bequeathed to his clerk and factotum a pension of £10 a year, and various legacies amounting to about £700. [16] The old home in the Temple had to be given up, but whither the family first removed is not known. Four years later they were living in Little Queen Street—now a portion of Kingsway—off Holborn, in a house on the west side, the site of which is now covered by a church.

At the end of 1794—though his first known verses are dated five years earlier—Charles Lamb had, so far as we are aware, the pleasure of seeing himself for the first time "in print," and curiously enough here at the earliest beginning of his life as author he was intimately associated with Coleridge; indeed, his "effusion," a sonnet addressed to Mrs. Siddons, appeared in "The Morning Chronicle" on 29th December, with the signature "S. T. C." Coleridge, we learn from Lamb's letters, altered the sonnet and was welcome to do so, and the poem properly appears in both of their collected works; the recension is certainly not an improvement on the original. In the spring of 1796 a small volume of Coleridge's poems was published, four sonnets by Lamb being included in it; and in May, 1796, was written the earliest of the rich collection of Lamb's letters which have come down to us. In this letter we have the first mention of the shadow which overhung the Lamb family.

My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a madhouse at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don't bite any one. But mad I [17] was; and many a vagary my imagination played with me, enough to make a volume, if all were told.... Coleridge, it may convince you of my regard for you when I tell you my head ran on you in my madness as much almost as on another person, who I am inclined to think was the more immediate cause of my temporary frenzy.

It is assumed that the closing reference here is to Lamb's romantic love for A—— W——; the "Anna" of some of his sonnets written about this time, the "Alice W——" of the later "Dream Children," and other of the essays, and that it was to the unhappy course of a deep love that Charles Lamb owed his brief period of mental aberration. This year, 1796, which was to close in tragic gloom, was indeed marked almost throughout by unhappiness, lightened only by the close and friendly correspondence with Coleridge. From these letters we learn that besides his own mental trouble, his sister had been very ill, his brother was laid up and demanded constant attention, having a leg so bad that for a time the necessity of amputation appeared to be probable. [1] Through it all Charles Lamb was conscious of being "sore galled with disappointed hope," and felt something of enforced loneliness, consequent upon his being, as he described himself, "slow of speech and reserved of manners"; he went nowhere, as he put it, [18] had no acquaintance, and but one friend—Coleridge. It is difficult, in reading much in these letters, to realize that the writer was but just come of age in the previous February. The first twenty or so of the letters of Lamb which have come down to us are addressed to Coleridge (1796-1798). Between the seventh of the series (5th July, 1796) and the eighth (27th September, 1796) there is a gap of time at the close of which happened the tragedy that coloured the whole of Charles Lamb's subsequent life and caused him to give himself up to a life of devotion to which it would not be easy to find a parallel.

[1] It is curious that a quarter of a century later, when writing of his brother in "Dream Children," Lamb speaks of his being lame-footed, and of having his limb actually taken off.

The story is best told in the poignant simplicity of Lamb's first letter to Coleridge after the calamity:

My Dearest Friend ,

White, or some of my friends, or the public papers, by this time may have informed you of the terrible calamities that have fallen on our family. I will only give you the outlines: My poor dear, dearest sister, in a fit of insanity, has been the death of her own mother. I was at hand only time enough to snatch the knife out of her grasp. She is at present in a madhouse, from whence I hear she must be moved to an hospital. God has preserved to me my senses, I eat and drink and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and my aunt. Mr. Norris of the Blue-Coat School, has been very kind to us, and we have no other friends; but, thank God, I am very calm and composed, and able to do the best that remains [19] to do. Write as religious a letter as possible, but no mention of what is gone and done with. With me "the former things are passed away," and I have something more to do than to feel.

God Almighty have us all in His keeping!

Mention nothing of poetry, I have destroyed every vestige of past vanities of that kind. Do as you please, but if you publish, publish mine (I give free leave) without name or initial, and never send me a book, I charge you.

Your own judgment will convince you not to take any notice of this yet to your dear wife. You look after your family; I have my reason and strength left to take care of mine, I charge you, don't think of coming to see me. Write. I will not see you if you come. God Almighty love you and all of us!

At the inquest the only possible verdict was returned, that of homicide during temporary insanity, against the young woman who, in her frenzy, had killed her own mother and destroyed a home which she had been working hard, as a mantua maker, to help support. The awful shock had, perhaps, a steadying effect on Charles Lamb. Here he was at the age of one-and-twenty suddenly placed in a position that might have tried a strong-minded man in his prime; his brother, a dozen years his senior, so far as we are aware mixed himself as little as might be with the family tragedy; poor Mary had to be placed in an asylum and supported there, and a pledge taken for her future safe-guarding, while in the home a physically feeble old aunt and a ment [20] ally feeble old father had to be looked after and companioned. Humbly and unhesitatingly he who was but little more than a youth in years took up a task which it is painful even to contemplate; the simple spirit in which he did so may be realized from a noble letter which he sent to his friend at the time. The shattered family removed from Little Queen Street to 45, Chapel Street, Pentonville, and there in the following year Aunt Hetty died. In the spring of 1799 old John Lamb also passed away, and Mary returned to share her brother's home, to be tended always with loving solicitude, though ever and again she had to be removed during recurring attacks of her mental malady. In this brief summary of the story of Charles Lamb's life it is not necessary to keep referring to this fact, though it should be borne in mind that from time to time throughout their lives, Mary, affected now by solitariness and now by the over-excitement of seeing many friends, had to be placed under restraint for periods varying from a few weeks to several months. In this spring of 1799, too, with Mary's return to share her brother's life, began a new trouble. They were, as Lamb put it, "in a manner marked," and had frequently to change their lodgings until they were once more domiciled in the sanctuary of the Temple, where they had been born and where they had passed their childhood and youth.

In the first feeling of his horror after his mother's death, and with a sense of all the responsibility that had fallen upon his shoulders Lamb had disclaimed any further interest in literature, had asked Coleridge not to mention it, not to include his name in a projected volume. Yet he was to find in reading and in writing—and in the friendship of those who cared for reading and writing—at once a solace and a joy in his own life and a passport to the affections of generations of readers. In 1797 there was published a new edition of Coleridge's Poems, "to which are now added Poems by Charles Lamb and Charles Lloyd." In the summer of the same year he spent a week at Nether Stowey with Coleridge, [2] and in the autumn he and Lloyd passed a fortnight with Southey in Hampshire. He was consolidating the friendships which were to bind him ever closer to letters. With Coleridge, as we have seen, he was on terms of intimacy, and when that poet went abroad for a while Southey became Lamb's most intimate [22] correspondent. The keenly sensitive young man later resented being dubbed "gentle-hearted," and an apparent assumption of lofty superiority on the part of his friend, stung him to a memorable retort. We may take the story from one of Lamb's own letters to Southey:

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the eternal regret of his native Devonshire, emigrates to Westphalia: "poor Lamb" (these were his last words), if he wants any knowledge, he may apply to me. In ordinary cases I thank him. I have an "Encyclopaedia" at hand; but on such an occasion as going over to a German University, I could not refrain from sending him the following proposition to be by him defended or oppugned (or both) at Leipsic or Gottingen.

[2] Coleridge, disabled by some slight accident, was unable to accompany his friends on their walks during this visit of the Lambs, and once when they had left him he wrote the beautiful poem, "This Lime Tree Bower My Prison," which he "addressed to Charles Lamb, of the India House, London." In it that friend was referred to in this passage:

The Theses, as given in the letter to Coleridge, are as follows:

Theses Quædam Theologicæ.

First, Whether God loves a lying angel better than a true man?

Second, Whether the Archangel Uriel could affirm an untruth? and if he could, whether he would?

Third, Whether honesty be an angelic virtue, or not rather to be reckoned among those qualities which the school men term virtutes minus splendidæ ?

Fourth, Whether the higher order of Seraphim illuminati ever sneer?

Fifth, Whether pure intelligences can love?

Sixth, Whether the Seraphim ardentes do not manifest their virtues by the way of vision and [23] theory; and whether practice be not a sub-celestial and merely human virtue?

Seventh, Whether the vision beatific be anything more or less than a perpetual re-presentment to each individual angel of his own present attainments and future capabilities, somehow in the manner of mortal looking-glasses, reflecting a perpetual complacency and self-satisfaction?

Eighth, and last. Whether an immortal and amenable soul may not come to be condemned at last, and the man never suspect it before hand?

The poet did not reply, and the misunderstanding between the two was happily not long continued. I have sometimes doubted whether Coleridge ever knew Lamb so well as Lamb knew Coleridge, though of his affection for the brother and sister there can be no doubt; of them he wrote at the end of his life:

In his "Sidelights on Charles Lamb," too, Mr. Bertram Dobell rescued a remarkably interesting testimony "minuted down from the lips of Coleridge," which shows that the poet came to know Lamb better than when he sent his provocative message:

Charles Lamb has more totality and individuality of character than any other man I know, or have ever known in all my life. In most men we distinguish between the different powers of their intellect as one being predominant over the other. The genius of Wordsworth is greater than his talent, though considerable. The talent of Southey is greater than his genius, though respectable; and [24] so on. But in Charles Lamb it is altogether one; his genius is talent, and his talent is genius, and his heart is as whole and one as his head. The wild words that come from him sometimes on religious subjects would shock you from the mouth of any other man, but from him they seem mere flashes of fireworks. If an argument seem to his reason not fully true, he bursts out in that odd desecrating way; yet his will, the inward man, is, I well know, profoundly religious. Watch him, when alone, and you will find him with either a Bible or an old divine, or an old English poet; in such is his pleasure.

In 1798 was published "A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Poor Blind Margaret," a story of which Lamb wrote in the following year: "Rosamund sells well in London, malgré the non-reviewal of it," and in 1798 also, Lloyd and Lamb published a joint volume of "Blank Verse."

It was in the spring of 1801—a pleasant beginning of the new century for them—that the Lambs, after having had all too frequently to change their lodgings owing to the "rarity of Christian charity," which objected to housing a quiet couple because of their affliction, at length found pleasant residence in 16, Mitre Court Buildings. Writing to his friend, Thomas Manning—one of the correspondents with whom he was ever in the happiest vein—Lamb expatiated upon the moving very much in the style of his later essays:

I am going to change my lodgings, having received a hint that it would be agreeable, at our [25] Lady's next feast. I have partly fixed upon most delectable rooms, which look out (when you stand a tip-toe) over the Thames and Surrey Hills, at the upper end of King's Bench walks in the Temple. There I shall have all the privacy of a house without the encumbrance, and shall be able to lock my friends out as often as I desire to hold free converse with my immortal mind; for my present lodgings resemble a minister's levee, I have so increased my acquaintance (as they call 'em), since I have resided in town. Like the country mouse, that had tasted a little of urban manners, I long to be nibbling my own cheese by my dear self without mouse-traps and time-traps. By my new plan, I shall be as airy, up four pair of stairs, as in the country; and in a garden, in the midst of enchanting, more than Mahometan paradise, London, whose dirtiest, drab-frequented alley, and her lowest-bowing tradesman, I would not exchange for Skiddaw, Helvellyn James, Walter, and the parson into the bargain. O! her lamps of a night! her rich goldsmiths, print-shops, toy-shops, mercers, hardwaremen, pastry-cooks! St. Paul's churchyard! the Strand! Exeter Change! Charing Cross, with the man upon a black horse! These are thy gods, O London! Ain't you mightily moped on the banks of the Cam? Had you not better come and set up here? You can't think what a difference. All the streets and pavements are pure gold, I warrant you. At least I know an alchemy that turns her mud into that metal,—a mind that loves to be at home in crowds.

Here we have the voice of the best of London-lovers, and here we have also a hint of the way in which he was finding himself too much "accompanied"—to use a phrase from one of his unpublished letters. He frequently chafed against [26] the number of visitors who ate up his day, and at times had even to resent the way in which an intimate friend would be over-zealous in entertaining him, when for his own part he would rather have been alone. One special evening in each week was set apart for cards and conversation, and those occasions are perhaps among the best remembered features of early nineteenth-century literary life. Representative evenings will be found described in various works. [3] The company was not limited to literary folk, though many notable men of letters were to be met there, along with humbler friends, for the Lambs were catholic in their friendships, and had nothing of the exclusiveness of more pretentious salons. "We play at whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses smokes." At these gatherings Mary Lamb moved about observantly looking after her diverse guests, while Lamb himself, it has been said, might be depended upon for at once the wisest and the wittiest utterance of the evening. Here it was that he made his whimsical reproach to a player with dirty hands: "I say, Martin, if dirt were trumps what a hand you'd have." And it was on some such occasion, too, that he retorted on Wordsworth, who had said that the writing of "Hamlet" was not so very wonderful: "Here's Wordsworth says he could have written 'Hamlet'— if he had the mind ."

[3] In Talfourd's "Memorials" of Lamb; in Hazlitt's essay "Of Persons One would wish to have Seen." [27]

In the opening years of the century Lamb contributed epigrams and paragraphs to "The Albion," "The Morning Chronicle," and "The Morning Post" (thanks to Coleridge's introduction). His latest contribution to the first-named journal helped to bring about its sudden demise. One of the latest which was pointed at Sir James Mackintosh (author of "Vindicæ Gallicæ") may serve as a specimen of the personal epigram in which Lamb considered himself happiest:

Lamb's position after ten years at the India House had no doubt considerably improved, but he was glad of the opportunity of making an additional couple of guineas a week as epigrammatist to "The Morning Post." He did not, however, continue long at the work; it was too severe a tax to be ever wondering how this, that, or the other person or event could be hit off in a few lines of copy, and the irksomeness he felt, combined with the editorial exactions, caused him to give it up. In 1802 came a memorable visit by the Lambs to Coleridge at Keswick, a visit which resulted in Charles Lamb's thinking kindlier of mountains than he had hitherto done, without in any way lessening his strong local attachment to the metropolis. Of the day in which he climbed Skiddaw he said: [28] "It was a day that will stand out, like a mountain, I am sure, in my life"; a happy simile which would not have occurred to one who stood, so to speak, on a familiar footing with mountains.

The life in the Temple was roughly divided into two portions: the first, at Mitre Court Buildings, extended from the spring of 1801 to that of 1809; then there seems to have been a brief stay of a few weeks at 34, Southampton Buildings, Holborn, and at the end of the following May or beginning of June, the Lambs moved into 4, Inner Temple Lane, which "looks out upon a gloomy churchyard-like court, called Hare Court, with thin trees and a pump in it.... I was born near it, and used to drink at that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old." Here Lamb and his sister lived until 1817, continuing in their pleasant weekly evenings to afford a memorable centre for the meeting of memorable men. At one of these meetings when it was being debated, whom it was the different members of the company would like best to meet from among the notable men of letters of the past, Lamb promptly fixed upon Sir Thomas Browne and Fulke Greville. How many of us in such a debate to-day would as promptly name Charles Lamb!

During the first half of these years in the Temple, Charles Lamb had written much that now endears him to us; but little, it is to be feared, that made the great body of contemporary readers aware of his existence. In 1806 [29] he essayed dramatic authorship, had had his farce, "Mr. H.," performed at Drury Lane, had been present on the occasion of its solitary appearance when it was incontinently damned, and had himself taken part in the damnatory hissing. At the beginning of 1807 was published the "Tales from Shakspeare," for which he and his sister were jointly responsible, and for which they received a sum of sixty guineas; in 1808 came another book for children in "The Adventures of Ulysses," and in the same year the "Specimens of English Dramatic Poets Contemporary with Shakspeare."

During the second half of the stay in the Temple—the years at 4, Inner Temple Lane, which have been regarded as the happiest portion of his life—Lamb made but slight advance in literary reputation, but he was already firmly established in the favour of the few who had been privileged to know him, to hear his stammered wit, his spoken wisdom. Though this period from 1809 to 1817 is not marked by the production of notable books, it was during this time that he contributed to Leigh Hunt's "Reflector," wrote his "Recollections of Christ's Hospital" for the "Gentleman's Magazine," and his "Confessions of a Drunkard" for a friend's publication. Here were most Elia-like precursors of the famous "Essays."

In the autumn of 1817 the Lambs removed from the Temple in which they had passed the greater part of their lives, taking rooms over a brazier's shop at 20, Russell Street, Covent [30] Garden, at the corner of Bow Street, where, as Mary Lamb put it, they had "Drury Lane Theatre in sight of our front, and Covent Garden from our back windows." Covent Garden, as Charles said, "dearer to me than any garden of Alcinous, where we are morally sure of the earliest peas and 'sparagus." One of the first letters from the new lodgings Lamb whimsically addressed as from "The Garden of England." The half dozen years during which he lived here forms from a literary point of view the most memorable period of Lamb's life. Here he arranged for the publication of the two precious little volumes of his "Works" which were issued in the summer of 1818—volumes which he found "admirably adapted for giving away," having no exaggerated idea of the sensation which the publication was likely to make. That publication was arranged, apparently, at the request of the publishers, the brothers Ollier, whom he now numbered among his friends. Writing to Southey of the venture he said: "I do not know whether I have done a silly thing or a wise one, but it is of no great consequence. I run no risk and care for no censure." Here in Russell Street Lamb continued his sociable weekly evenings—changed from Wednesdays to Thursdays—here, indeed, he had to chafe anew at the difficulty of having himself to himself; he was never C. L., he declared, but always C. L. and Co. He had, indeed, something of a genius for friendship; however much he might wish to be alone, he was, there can be little [31] doubt, ever genial, ever his wise and whimsical self, even when suffering under the untimely advent of "Mr. Hazlitt, Mr. Martin Burney, or Morgan Demigorgon"; he had to suffer—or imagine that he suffered—from the effects of a personal charm of which he was wholly unaware; but if he had not been so friendlily accessible the world would probably have lacked record of many of the delightful hints which help towards our realization of one of the most attractive personalities in our literary history.

SKETCH OF CHARLES LAMB AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR.

From the original in the Print Room of the British Museum.

Lamb was already in middle age—in his forty-sixth year—when there came to him an opportunity of expressing himself in the way best suited to his genius. Early in 1820 there was started a new periodical under the simple title of "The London Magazine." Several of Lamb's friends were among the contributors, and he also was probably invited to write for it at an early date. His first contribution appeared in the number for August signed "Elia" (call it "Ellia," said he), the name having occurred to Lamb's memory as that of a whilom fellow-clerk of his thirty years earlier at the South Sea House; for several years he continued his contributions to this remarkable miscellany, finding in the personal informal essay the most congenial medium for expressing his mature wisdom, his whimsical humour, his radiant wit. By the close of 1822 there were essays enough to make a volume, and in 1823, such duly appeared. Even with this Lamb was not to touch popularity—it may be doubted whether [32] he ever did that in his lifetime. He was known, admired, loved by a large circle of friends and acquaintances, but his work made little impression, we may believe, upon the wider reading public; it was, however, fully appreciated by those of his contemporaries best able to judge, and "Elia" came to be recognized as one of the literary mainstays of a magazine which counted among its contributors, De Quincey, Allan Cunningham, B. W. Procter, William Hazlitt, Hartley Coleridge, Horace Smith, and many more writers of note in their day.

Little more than six months after Lamb's first essay signed "Elia" had appeared in the "London," the editor of that magazine was wounded in a duel and died, and in the summer of 1821 the periodical changed hands, but retained its brilliant staff of contributors, and acquired the services of Thomas Hood, then a young man of two-and-twenty, as a "sort of sub-editor." The new proprietors gave monthly dinners to their writers, and here Lamb would meet some of his old friends and many new. Hood has recorded his first meeting with Elia in the offices of the magazine, and his account may be quoted, affording as it does something like a glimpse of Lamb in his habit as he lived at the time of the full maturity of his powers:

I was sitting one morning beside our Editor, busily correcting proofs, when a visitor was announced, whose name, grumbled by a low ventriloquial voice, like Tom Pipes calling from the hold through the hatchway, did not resound distinctly [33] on my tympanum. However, the door opened, and in came a stranger,—a figure remarkable at a glance, with a fine head, on a small spare body, supported by two almost immaterial legs. He was clothed in sables, of a bygone fashion, but there was something wanting, or something present about him, that certified he was neither a divine, nor a physician, nor a school master: from a certain neatness and sobriety in his dress, coupled with his sedate bearing, he might have been taken, but that such a costume would be anomalous, for a Quaker in black. He looked still more like (what he really was) a literary Modern Antique, a New-Old Author, a living anachronism, contemporary at once with Burton the Elder, and Colman the Younger. Meanwhile he advanced with rather a peculiar gait, his walk was plantigrade, and with a cheerful "How d'ye do," and one of the blandest, sweetest smiles that ever brightened a manly countenance, held out two fingers to the Editor. The two gentlemen in black soon fell into discourse; and whilst they conferred the Lavater principle within me set to work upon the interesting specimen thus presented to its speculations. It was a striking intellectual face, full of wiry lines, physiognomical quips and cranks, that gave it great character. There was much earnestness about the brows, and a deal of speculation in the eyes, which were brown and bright, and "quick in turning"; the nose, a decided one, though of no established order; and there was a handsome smartness about the mouth. Altogether it was no common face—none of those willow-pattern ones, which Nature turns out by thousands at her potteries;—but more like a chance specimen of the Chinese ware, one to the set—unique, antique, quaint. No one who had once seen it, could pretend not to know it again. It was no face to lend [34] its countenance to any confusion of persons in a Comedy of Errors. You might have sworn to it piecemeal,—a separate affidavit for every feature. In short his face was as original as his figure; his figure as his character; his character as his writings; his writings the most original of the age. After the literary business had been settled, the Editor invited his contributor to dinner, adding "we shall have a hare"—

The hesitation in the speech, and the readiness of the allusion were alike characteristic of the individual, who his familiars will perchance have recognized already as the delightful Essayist, the capital Critic, the pleasant Wit and Humorist, the delicate-minded and large-hearted Charles Lamb!

This gives us at once something of a glimpse of Lamb as he appeared to the eyes of his contemporaries, and an indication of the impression which his genius had made on another man of genius. With his Elia essays he may be said to have crowned his achievements in the eyes of those who knew him, and, in fact, his active work, or that part of it which counts, may be said to have ended with the production of these essays, which he wrote at first for the "London," and occasionally later for other periodicals.

In 1823 came another removal. During the summer, or when busy over some piece of writing, Lamb had stayed a while at Dalston or other semi-rural place away from the time-wasting friends and fascinations of town. Thus when it was decided to leave Russell Street the [35] move was made to semi-suburban quietude and retirement.

When you come London-ward you will find me no longer in Covt Gard. I have a Cottage, in Colebrook row, Islington. A cottage, for it is detach'd; a white house, with 6 good rooms; the New River (rather elderly by this time) runs (if a moderate walking pace can be so termed) close to the foot of the house; and behind is a spacious garden, with vines (I assure you), pears, strawberries, parsnips, leeks, carrots, cabbages, to delight the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without passage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded over and rough with old Books, and above is a lightsome Drawing-room 3 windows, full of choice prints. I feel like a great Lord, never having had a house before....

I heard of you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate the growth of vegetable nature. I can now understand in what sense they speak of Father Adam . I recognize the paternity, while I watch my tulips.

Were Lamb a matter-of-fact correspondent it might be pointed out that tulips are not much to watch in September. During the winter of 1824-5 he suffered from ill health, and in April, 1825, he was allowed to retire from the East India House with a pension of two-thirds of his salary, less a small sum to assure an annuity for his sister in the event of his dying first. For [36] thirty-three years had he continued in his office, and his salary had gradually grown from the modest £70 of the beginning to ten times that amount at his retirement, so that he became a superannuated man with an income ample for the modest requirements of himself and Mary. On the subject of his retirement he wrote some touching letters to friends such as Wordsworth and Bernard Barton, and also in his accustomed manner made the crucial event the subject of a delightful "Elia" essay. He had before expatiated on the excellent position of the authors who were not "authors for bread"—men who like himself were employed in business during the day and had to dally with literature in off hours. Certainly Lamb's "hack work," the work done for the booksellers during the early part of the century, was his least memorable achievement, and we cannot help feeling what a boon it was to Lamb himself and to Letters that he was chained so long to the desk's dead wood, instead of being dependent on the favour of the booksellers for his livelihood, and upon the popular taste of the moment for his themes.

In 1820, during a summer holiday at Cambridge, Lamb met an orphan girl, Emma Isola, then eleven years of age, whom he and Mary later adopted, and the letters have many references to the welcome companionship of Emma, who gave something of a new interest in life to the brother and sister. [4] In 1827 the household [37] removed again, this time to the Chase, Enfield. Two years later they gave up the house of their own and boarded with a Mr. and Mrs. Westwood, their next-door neighbours. In 1833 Mary, who had had frequently to be "from home," as it has been euphemistically put, was under the charge of Mr. and Mrs. Walden at Bay Tree Cottage, Edmonton, when Charles decided to live under the same roof with her, even during her periods of mental derangement, and followed her thither, in

[4] Emma Isola married Edward Moxon, the publisher.

How much Mary's companionship meant to him may be gathered from an open-hearted letter which he had written in 1805 to Dorothy Wordsworth—and it meant no less in the years that followed:

I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all her former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong; so used am I to look up to her in the least and the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about to praise her; for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on [38] her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me.

On 25th July, 1834, Coleridge died, and the blow was a terrible one to Charles Lamb; "we die many deaths before we die," he had said of the departure of friends; and the passing of Coleridge may be said to have come as a fatal shock, for he survived him but five months, and during that time was heard to say again and again, as though the fact were too stupendous to believe, not to be realized, "Coleridge is dead!" Taking his usual morning walk in the fourth week of December, Lamb stumbled and fell, bruising his face; the bruise did not seem serious, but erysipelas supervened, and on 27th December, 1834, the beloved friend, the noble man, passed into the great silence. He was buried in Edmonton Churchyard, and there, nearly thirteen years later, was laid by him the dear sister who had so long watched over him, whom he had so long guarded.

"'Saint Charles,' said Thackeray to me, thirty years ago, putting one of Charles Lamb's letters to his forehead." [5]

[5] Edward FitzGerald's "Letters."

HIS PRINCIPAL WRITINGS

The writings of Charles Lamb fall more or less naturally into four or five groups—with, of course, inevitable overlappings—and it is better to consider them thus, rather than in the strict order of their production.

It was in poetry that he made his first essays, as we have seen, and this is not to be wondered at in one who had early read the old poetic treasures of our literature, and in the close companion of so deeply poetic a man as Coleridge. He was, indeed, himself essentially a poet, though his work in verse falls far below that which he achieved in prose. The perusal of a slim volume of the sonnets of William Lisle Bowles was the small occasion from which sprang the great event of Lamb's and Coleridge's commencing to write poetry. To the sonnet form Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most felicitously, for two or three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which makes them remain in the mind. This one, with its familiar close, may stand as representative of the days [40] when Bowles was still the god of his poetic idolatry:

In his blank verse—and couplets—of the same period, the time when he was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in this form "On His Recovery from an Indisposition"). These, however, were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less conscious imitation, and Lamb was not long in finding his feet and indicating his peculiar individuality. He had learned much from the free expressions of the old dramatic poets, and in such pieces as "The Old Familiar Faces"—a poignant cry from a suffering soul—or in his unconventional sonnet, "The Gipsy's Malison," written more than thirty [41] years later, we have some of the most markedly individual of his poems. He was not a poet, he declared—running counter to the judgement of some of his later critics—but essentially a prosaic writer. All that he wrote in verse, apart from the plays, would come within the compass of a small volume, and perhaps half of that would be occupied with album verses, slight vers d'occasion , such as are more often the products of prose-writers' leisure than of a poet who sings because he must. He felt his way to prose through poetry as so many lesser writers have done, and on the way uttered perhaps a dozen pieces, which for one reason or another will ever make a lasting appeal to readers. The sense of tragedy in "The Old Familiar Faces"—more remarkable in that it was tragedy realized and expressed at the age of three-and-twenty—the weird imagination of "The Gipsy's Malison," the sweet portraiture of "Hester," the fancy of "A Farewell to Tobacco," and the "Ode to the Treadmill," will ensure that portion of his work to which they belong, sharing the immortality of the essays of Elia.

As an earnest student of dramatic literature Lamb early turned his attention to the theatre, and was moved with an ambition to write for the stage. In his twenty-fourth year he started upon a piece to be entitled "Pride's Cure," and his letters about this time contain many refer [42] ences to its progress and give various extracts from it—extracts which by themselves might suggest that the play would be a notable one, but the event turned out otherwise. At the end of 1799 the piece was submitted under the title of "John Woodvil" to Kemble, and a year later it was rejected. "John Woodvil" is poor indeed as a play; it has some capital scenes, it has some beautiful passages, but of dramatic story or characterization there is nothing. The play is concerned with the fortunes of the Woodvils, a Devonshire family, at the time of the Restoration. Sir Walter Woodvil is a Cromwellian, living in hiding with his younger son, Simon, while John holds high revel with boon companions. Sir Walter's ward, Margaret, who is beloved by John, finds that young man's affection cooling, and thus leaves him and goes (disguised as a boy) to join her guardian in Sherwood Forest. Then John, in a moment of intoxication, blabs to one of his companions of his proscribed father's whereabouts, and follows it up by quarrelling with that companion, who forthwith sets off with another to arrest Sir Walter. The old man believes that his son has betrayed him and promptly dies of a broken heart. The play ends with the reconciliation of John and Margaret. A ridiculously slight story for a five-act play. Much in the writing of it shows the author's loving study of seventeenth-century models, as may be seen from this speech of Simon's on being asked what are the sports he and his father use in the forest: [43]

Lamb's next attempt on the theatre was the prose farce of "Mr. H——," in which a wholly inadequate motif was made to supply material for two acts. The piece was played once (Drury Lane, 10th December, 1806) and damned. The eponymous hero, who chooses to be known merely by his initial, creates quite a sensation at Bath, as he is believed to be a nobleman travelling incognito. Hitherto always rejected by the ladies on account of his unfortunate patronym, he has wooed successfully under an initial, when he nearly spoils all by betraying [44] that his name is—Hogsflesh! He is forthwith shunned, but his ladylove remains faithful to him on his making the very natural change of Hogsflesh into Bacon. In his method and atmosphere, Lamb had passed from the seventeenth to the late eighteenth century; he got a hearing, but he did not get—and it must be admitted that he did not deserve—success. The farce is interesting as containing in an inquisitive landlord, Jeremiah Pry, the original, it may be assumed, of a whole family of Paul Prys, of which to-day John Poole's is the best remembered.

Two other dramatic pieces were written by Lamb in his later years: "The Wife's Trial, or, The Intruding Widow" (founded upon Crabbe's "The Confidant"), in blank verse, and a second farce, "The Pawnbroker's Daughter," in prose. In these two pieces he had made distinct advances, yet neither was perhaps suited for stage representation. In "The Wife's Trial" we have a couple—Mr. and Mrs. Selby—five years married, on whose hospitality a widow forces herself owing to some mysterious hold which she has over the wife. Mrs. Selby had been secretly married as a schoolgirl, though her husband left her at the church door and had died abroad. The widow striving to use this knowledge for purposes not far removed from blackmail, is neatly hoist with her own petard, and the slight play ends with the cordial reconciliation of the Selbys. In "The Pawnbroker's Daughter" once more the story is of the slightest, though the [45] farce seems more fitted for the stage than "Mr. H——." Marion, the daughter of a pawnbroker, is, against her father's wishes, wooed by a gentleman, and, thanks to the trick of a maid, goes off with her lover while carrying some valuable jewels with which her father has entrusted her. There are two other lovers, Pendulous—who has been unjustly hanged and only reprieved just in time to save his life—and Marian Flyn, and out of their by-play comes the reconciliation of all. The feelings of the half-hanged man had earlier been dealt with by Lamb in a letter "On the Inconveniences Resulting from being Hanged," which he contributed (as "Pensilis") to "The Reflector" in 1811.

After essaying poetry and the drama (for both of which he maintained a lifelong liking, writing in each form during his latest years), the next kind of literary expression on which Lamb ventured was that of stories and verses for children. In "Rosamund Gray," which is scarcely a tale for children but rather a classic novelette, he gives the story of a young orphan girl living at Widford in Hertfordshire with her blind grandmother. The girl is beloved by young Allan Clare, and one evening, wandering in sheer joy over the scenes of past delightful rambles, she is assailed by a villain. Her blind grandmother finding her gone from the cottage dies of a broken heart, and poor Rosamund, disgraced [46] and terrified, seeks the home of Allan and his sister and there dies. It is a terrible story told with a beautiful simplicity. Of how far it may have been founded on fact we do not know, but in Rosamund, Lamb seems to have depicted something of a likeness of the "fair-haired maid" with whom he had been in love, and in Elinor Clare there can be no doubt that he portrayed much of the character of his own loved sister.

The first of Lamb's known publications professedly for children was "The King and Queen of Hearts: showing how notably the Queen made her Tarts, and how scurvily the Knave stole them away: with other particulars pertaining thereto," and this was only recovered about ten years since after having been forgotten for the best part of a century. The booklet, which was issued anonymously, consists of a number of rough pictures, each accompanied by half a dozen lines of Hudibrastic verse; the inspiration being of course the old nursery rhyme about the tarts made by the Queen of Hearts and their subsequent fate.

The "Tales from Shakspeare," which followed, were written by both Charles Lamb and his sister: indeed the work seems at first to have been intended for Mary's hand alone, but her brother undertook the telling of the stories of the tragedies, and to use his own words, out of the twenty tales he was "responsible for Lear, Macbeth, Timon, Romeo, Hamlet, Othello, for occasionally a tail-piece or correction of grammar, [47] for none of the cuts, and for all of the spelling." When the work was originally produced it had illustrations to which Lamb objected. His reference to tail-pieces is possibly an indication that he sometimes rounded off the stories for his sister, just as he certainly completed the preface for her. Though the dual authorship of the volume is referred to in the preface the publisher put Charles Lamb's name as author of the whole on the title-page of the book. The "Tales" are of course designed for young readers—they are told, as it has been recognized, with a kind of Wordsworthian simplicity—as an introduction to "the rich treasures from which the small and valueless coins are extracted." How admirably they have served their purpose for generations of readers is to be seen in the long succession of editions in which the work has been issued.

Again did brother and sister collaborate in the next of the children's books associated with the name of Lamb, and again Charles was responsible for but about a third of the whole. Of the ten tales in "Mrs. Leicester's School" he wrote but three. These stories, which are supposed to be told by young girls to their school-mates, are simple records of childish experiences recounted with childish naïveté. They met with some success during the lifetime of their authors—ten editions being disposed of in something under twenty years—and still hold their own, both as gift books for the young and as parts of that wonderfully varied, yet almost wholly delightful body of literature, associated with the name of [48] Lamb. Here, as later in the "Essays of Elia," we have recollections of the actual events of their own childhood permeating the invented narratives and imparting a new interest to the whole. Coleridge prophesied remarkably about this little book, when in talking to a friend he said:

It at once soothes and amuses me to think—nay, to know—that the time will come when this little volume of my dear and well-nigh oldest friend, Mary Lamb, will be not only enjoyed but acknowledged as a rich jewel in the treasury of our permanent English literature; and I cannot help running over in my mind the long list of celebrated writers, astonishing geniuses, Novels, Romances, Poems, Histories, and dense Political Economy quartos, which, compared with "Mrs. Leicester's School," will be remembered as often and praised as highly as Wilkie's and Glover's Epics and Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophies compared with "Robinson Crusoe!"

In the "Adventures of Ulysses" Lamb sought to provide what he termed a supplement to Fénelon's long-popular "Adventures of Telemachus." He took the story from Chapman's translation of Homer's "Odyssey," that translation which a few years later was to inspire John Keats with one of his finest sonnets. In a preface, a model of concise expression, the author of the tale explained:

By avoiding the prolixity which marks the speeches and the descriptions in Homer, I have gained a rapidity to the narration which I hope [49] will make it more attractive, and give it more the air of a romance, to young readers; though I am sensible that, by the curtailment, I have sacrificed in many places the manners to the passion, the subordinate characteristics to the essential interests of the story. The attempt is not to be considered as seeking a comparison with any of the direct translations of the "Odyssey," either in prose or verse; though if I were to state the obligations which I have had to one obsolete version, I should run the hazard of depriving myself of the very slender degree of reputation which I could hope to acquire from a trifle like the present undertaking.

If Chapman's translation of Homer was "obsolete" in 1808, it was yet to be restored to the favour of readers, thanks to the loving homage of Lamb and Keats. "Chapman is divine," wrote the author of the "Adventures of Ulysses" to a friend, "and my abridgement has not quite emptied him of his divinity." In his story Lamb shows how he had recognized the moral value of the story of Ulysses, of "a brave man struggling with adversity," but wisely leaves that moral to be insensibly impressed upon the reader, for he not only refrained from formulating a definite "moral" in such a case, but has explicitly recorded his repugnance from the method.

In "Poetry for Children" we have again a work for which brother and sister were jointly responsible, and again—though we cannot ex [50] actly allot the parts—Charles, as we learn from his letters, wrote but about one third of the whole. Three years after publication the two small volumes in which this work had been issued were out of print, though a number of the pieces were included by the publisher in a "Poetry Book" compilation. In 1827 Lamb wanted a copy and could not get it, indeed the little work had disappeared in the most complete fashion, and another half century was to pass before a copy was to be recovered, and then it came from Australia, closely followed by one of an American edition, "pirated" in 1812. It is strange that Charles and Mary Lamb, "an old bachelor and an old maid," as he put it, should have been so successful as caterers for children. That they were successful there is no doubt, and there is no reason why this "Poetry for Children" of theirs should not—now happily recovered in its entirety—go on pleasing and influencing many generations of young readers; that they do please the little ones of to-day I have readily proved. The verses are on the simplest themes, set forth in varied metres, but chiefly such metres as children can most readily remember, and though they are for the most part didactic, they are didactic in a way which the child does not resent. There is no telling a tale and then trying to enforce a moral from its consideration, but the moral is a natural part of the whole, and doubtless has its healthy effect.

"Prince Dorus" is a pleasant little story in easy verse, telling of a king who fell in love with [51] a great Princess, but was in despair because his love was not requited:

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:

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."

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. [53] "We have 'Specimens of Ancient English Poets,' 'Specimens of Modern English Poets,' 'Specimens of Ancient English Prose Writers,' without end. They used to be called 'Beauties'! You have seen 'Beauties of Shakspeare'? so have many people that never saw any beauties in Shakspeare." Lamb was not by any means, however, an imitator of the unfortunate clerical forger, Dodd, in the scheme which he had in hand. When we turn to the "Specimens" themselves we discover them to be fine indeed, and in reading them and the brief but pregnant notes upon them, we marvel at the sureness of the touch and the maturity of the writer. The notes, or commentary, rarely extend beyond a score of lines, and are most often far below that, yet they are always wonderfully pertinent; there is "no philology, no antiquarianism, no discussion of difficult or corrupt passages," no pedantry in fact, or dry-as-dustism. It must not be forgotten when we look over the volume with scenes from the plays of Kyd, Peele, Marlowe, Dekker, Marston, Chapman, Heywood, Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, Ford, Jonson, Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Shirley and others—it must not be forgotten that Lamb was pleading the merits of these dramatic poets before a generation to which some of them were but names and the rest practically non-existent. The suggestion which Lamb throws out in the preface that he had desired to show "how much of Shakspeare shines in the great men his contemporaries" is amply borne out in his brief notes upon his selections. [54] This can best be proved by giving some of the editorial comments from the collection itself, comments which fully establish Lamb in his high place among the clearest sighted if least voluminous of our true critics:

Heywood is a sort of prose Shakspeare. His scenes are to the full as natural and affecting. But we miss the Poet , that which in Shakspeare always appears out and above the surface of the nature . Heywood's characters, his Country Gentlemen, etc., are exactly what we see (but of the best kind of what we see) in life. Shakspeare makes us believe, while we are among his lovely creations, that they are nothing but what we are familiar with, as in dreams new things seem old: but we awake, and sigh for the difference.

The insipid levelling morality to which the modern stage is tied down would not admit of such admirable passions as these scenes are filled with. A Puritanical obtuseness of sentiment, a stupid infantile goodness, is creeping among us, instead of the vigorous passions and virtues clad in flesh and blood, with which the old dramatists present us. Those noble and liberal casuists could discern in the differences, the quarrels, the animosities of man, a beauty and truth of moral feeling, no less than in the iterately inculcated duties of forgiveness and atonement. With us all is hypocritical meekness. A reconciliation scene (let the occasion be never so absurd or unnatural) is always sure of applause. Our audiences come to the theatre to be complimented on their goodness. They compare notes with the amiable characters in the play, and find a wonderful similarity of disposition between them. We have a common stock of dramatic morality out [55] of which a writer may be supplied without the trouble of copying from originals within his own breast. To know the boundaries of honour, to be judiciously valiant, to have a temperance which shall beget a smoothness in the angry swellings of youth, to esteem life as nothing when the sacred reputation of a parent is to be defended, yet to shake and tremble under a pious cowardice when that ark of an honest confidence is found to be frail and tottering, to feel the true blows of a real disgrace blunting that sword which the imaginary strokes of a supposed false imputation had put so keen an edge upon but lately; to do, or to imagine this done in a feigned story, asks something more of a moral sense, somewhat a greater delicacy of perception in questions of right and wrong, than goes to the writing of two or three hackneyed sentences about the laws of honour as opposed to the laws of the land or a commonplace against duelling. Yet such things would stand a writer nowadays in far better stead than Captain Ager and his conscientious honour; and he would be considered a far better teacher of morality than old Rowley or Middleton if they were living.

Though some resemblance may be traced between the Charms in Macbeth and the Incantations in this Play, which is supposed to have preceded it, this coincidence will not detract much from the originality of Shakspeare. His Witches are distinguished from the Witches of Middleton by essential differences. These are creatures to whom man or woman plotting some dire mischief might resort for occasional consultation. Those originate deeds of blood, and begin bad impulses to men. From the moment that their eyes first meet with Macbeth's, he is spellbound. That meeting sways his destiny. He can never break the fascination. These Witches [56] can hurt the body: those have power over the soul. Hecate in Middleton has a Son, a low buffoon: the hags of Shakspeare have neither child of their own, nor seem to be descended from any parent. They are foul Anomalies, of whom we know not whence they are sprung, nor whether they have beginning or ending. As they are without human passions, so they seem to be without human relations. They come with thunder and lightning, and vanish to airy music. This is all we know of them.—Except Hecate, they have no names; which heightens their mysteriousness. Their names, and some of the properties, which Middleton has given to his Hags, excite smiles. The Weird Sisters are serious things. Their presence cannot co-exist with mirth. But in a lesser degree the witches of Middleton are fine creations. Their power too is, in some measure, over the mind. They raise jars, jealousies, strife, like a thick scurf o'er life .

Here surely we have the right stuff. Terse, pregnant sentences; few words, but going to the very heart of the matter. That Lamb was justly proud of his pioneer work in this field of literary research is certain, for in a short autobiography which he prepared for a friend's album—in what has been called "the briefest, and perhaps the wittiest and most truthful autobiography in the language"—he wrote as follows:

He also was the first to draw the Public attention to the old English Dramatists, in a work called "Specimens of English Dramatic Writers who lived about the Time of Shakspeare," published about fifteen years since.

Of Lamb's work in this field the elder Disraeli [57] admirably said, "He carries us on through whole scenes by a true, unerring motion. His was a poetical mind, labouring in poetry." Within the century that has elapsed since Lamb was engaged in exploring the forgotten old tomes in which lay buried so much excellent literature, the study which he started has taken its place as one of the most important of its kind, and a large library might be formed of the books and reprints which may be looked upon as direct descendants of that modest single octavo volume of 1808. During his later years Lamb devised something in the nature of a supplement when he prepared further extracts from the Garrick collection of plays in the British Museum for Hone's "Table Book" (1827), and these extracts are now generally bound up with the earlier ones in a single work.

In giving this summary account of Lamb's writings it has been thought best only to keep to a very roughly chronological method, leaving his letters to be touched upon last. Finding earliest expression in poetry, he then turned to the drama, fully equipped with knowledge and a fine enthusiasm, but lacking some of the most vitally essential qualities necessary to success; he then passed more or less by force of circumstance—the need of making money and the desire to help his sister in her newly-found work—to the writing of prose and verse for children; and later he began to make wider use of the fine critical [58] instinct of which he had given early indications in his correspondence. All of these were to be in a measure overshadowed by his achievement as essayist. That work as essayist was chiefly the product of his prime—of the days of the "London Magazine"—but he had made several notable contributions of this character during the preceding twenty years; essays which are now to be found in different posthumous collections of his writings—"Eliana," "Critical Essays," "Essays and Sketches," "Miscellaneous Prose," and so on. When, thanks to the kindly offices of Coleridge, Lamb became a contributor to the "Morning Post," he proposed to furnish some imitations of Burton, the 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, [59] 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.

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 [60] 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.

Lamb was first revealed to the reading public as a great letter-writer in Talfourd's "Memorials of Charles Lamb" nearly seventy years ago. Since that time each further publication of the letters has brought fresh material to light which has but gone to strengthen Lamb's position as one of the first two or three letter-writers whose epistles have taken their places in English literature. If we must "place" our great men, there are not wanting critics who would accord Lamb a position at the very head of those in this par [61] ticular branch. "To an idler like myself, to write and receive letters are both very pleasant;" thus Lamb in one of his earliest letters to Coleridge, and there can be little doubt that in this occupation he frequently found the truth of the statement that the labour we delight in physics pain. In communion with men of kindred tastes he must often have lost the sense of his haunting troubles in intellectual and external interests.

Two or three scraps from the letters have been quoted in the first chapter but as their peculiarly rich wit and humour, using that much-abused word in its fullest significance, can best be shown by example, we may here give a couple more. The first is from a letter written in 1810, and addressed to Manning, the correspondent with whom Lamb was most entertainingly whimsical. The second letter, given in its entirety, was addressed in 1827 to Thomas Hood.

Holcroft had finished his life when I wrote to you, and Hazlitt has since finished his life—I do not mean his own life, but he has finished a life of Holcroft, which is going to press. Tuthill is Dr. Tuthill. I continue Mr. Lamb. I have published a little book for children on titles of honour: and to give them some idea of the difference of rank and gradual rising, I have made a little scale, supposing myself to receive the following various accessions of dignity from the king, who is the fountain of honour.—As at first, 1, Mr. C. Lamb; 2, C. Lamb, Esq.; 3, Sir C. Lamb, Bart,; 4, Baron Lamb of Stamford; 5, Viscount Lamb; 6, Earl Lamb; 7, Marquis Lamb; 8, Duke Lamb. It would look like quibbling to carry it on further, and especially as it [62] is not necessary for children to go beyond the ordinary titles of sub-regal dignity in our own country, otherwise I have sometimes in my dreams imagined myself still advancing, as 9th, King Lamb; 10th, Emperor Lamb; 11th, Pope Innocent, higher than which is nothing but the Lamb of God. Puns I have not made many (nor punch much), since the day of my last; one I cannot help relating. A constable in Salisbury Cathedral was telling me that eight people dined at the top of the spire of the cathedral, upon which I remarked that they must be very sharp set. But in general I cultivate the reasoning part of my mind more than the imaginative. Do you know Kate * * *. I am so stuffed out with eating turkey for dinner, and another turkey for supper yesterday (turkey in Europe and turkey in Asia), that I can't jog on. It is New Year here. That is, it was New Year half a year back, when I was writing this. Nothing puzzles me more than time and space, and yet nothing puzzles me less, for I never think about them. The Persian ambassador is the principal thing talked of now. I sent some people to see him worship the sun on Primrose Hill at half past six in the morning 28th November; but he did not come, which makes me think the old fire-worshippers are a sect almost extinct in Persia. Have you trampled on the Cross yet? The Persian ambassador's name is Shaw Ali Mirza. The common people call him Shaw Nonsense. While I think of it, I have put three letters besides my own three into the India post for you, from your brother, sister, and some gentleman whose name I forget. Will they, have they, did they, come safe? The distance you are at cuts up tenses by the root.

Dear Hood ,—If I have anything in my head I will send it to Mr. Watts. Strictly speaking he should [63] have had my Album verses, but a very intimate friend importuned me for the trifles, and I believe I forgot Mr. Watts, or lost sight at the time of his similar Souvenir. Jamieson conveyed the farce from me to Mrs. C. Kemble, he will not be in town before the 27th. Give our kind loves to all at Highgate, and tell them that we have finally torn ourselves out right away from Colebrooke, where I had no health, and are about to domiciliate for good at Enfield, where I have experienced good .

See the rest in the Complete Angler. We have got our books into our new house. I am a drayhorse if I was not asham'd of the indigested dirty lumber as I toppled 'em out of the cart, and blest Becky that came with 'em for her having an unstuff'd brain with such rubbish. We shall get in by Michael's mass. 'Twas with some pain we were evuls'd from Colebrook. You may find some of our flesh sticking to the door posts. To change habitations is to die to them, and in my time I have died seven deaths. But I don't know whether every such change does not bring with it a rejuvenescence. 'Tis an enterprise, and shoves back the sense of death's approximating, which tho' not terrible to me, is at all times particular distasteful. My house-deaths have generally been periodical, recurring after seven years, but this last is premature by half that time. Cut off in the flower of Colebrook. The Middletonian stream and all its echoes mourn. Even minnows dwindle. A parvis fiunt MINIMI. I fear to invite Mrs. Hood to our new mansion, lest she envy it and rote us. But when we are fairly in, I hope she will come and try it. I heard she and you were made uncomfortable by some unworthy to be cared [64] for attacks, and have tried to set up a feeble counter-action through the Table Book of last Saturday. Has it not reach'd you, that you are silent about it? Our new domicile is no manor house, but new, and externally not inviting, but furnish'd within with every convenience. Capital new locks to every door, capital grates in every room, with nothing to pay for incoming and the rent £10 less than the Islington one. It was built a few years since at £1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly believe it. And I get it for £35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, and West End perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!) but occasionally to breathe the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited. Plays too we'll see—perhaps our own. Urbani Sylvani, and Sylvan Urbanuses in turns. Courtiers for a spurt, then philosophers. Old homely tell-truths and learn-truths in the virtuous shades of Enfield. Liars again and mocking gibers in the coffee-houses and resorts of London. What can a mortal desire more for his bi-parted nature?

O the curds and cream you shall eat with us here! O the turtle soup and lobster sallads we shall devour with you there! O the old books we shall peruse here! O the new nonsense we shall trifle with over there! O Sir T. Browne!—here. O Mr. Hood and Mr. Jerdan there! thine, C(urbanus) L(sylvanus) (ELIA ambo)—

Inclos'd are verses which Emma sat down to write, her first, on the eve after your departure. Of course they are only for Mrs. H.'s perusal. They will shew you at least that one of our party is [65] not willing to cut old friends. What to call 'em I don't know. Blank verse they are not, because of the rhymes.—Rhimes they are not, because of the blank verse. Heroics they are not, because they are lyric, lyric they are not, because of the Heroic measure. They must be called EMMAICS .—

The full charm of the long early letters, with their pleasant expatiations on literary themes can scarcely be sampled without doing violence. The various editions in which the letters are obtainable will be found referred to in the bibliographical list at the end of this little book. In illustration of their continued appreciation it may be mentioned that three editions have been published during the past year or so, each of which contains letters denied to the others. The latest edition—that of Mr. E. V. Lucas—is also the fullest, both in the number of letters included and in the elaboration of its annotatory matter.

Holograph letter to John Clare, "the Peasant Poet." Reduced facsimile from the original in the British Museum.

[Please click on the image for a larger image]

Transcript of the Handwritten Letter to John Clare

India house 31 Aug 1822

Dear Clare, I thank you heartily for your present. I am an inveterate old Londoner, but while I am among your choice collections, I seem to be native to them, and free of the country. The quantity of your observation has astonished me. What have most pleased me have been Recollections after a Ramble, and those Grongar Hill kind of pieces in eight syllable lines, my favourite measure, such as Cowper Hill and Solitude. In some of your story telling Ballads the provincial phrases sometimes startle me. I think you are too profuse with them. In poetry slang of every kind is to be avoided. There is a rustick Cockneyism [67] as little pleasing as ours of London. Transplant Arcadia to Helpstone. The true rustic style, the Arcadian English, I think is to be found in Shenstones. Would his Schoolmistress, the prettiest of poems, have been better, if he had used quite the Goody's own language? Now and then a home rusticism is fresh & startling, but where nothing is gained in expression, it is out of tenor. It may make people folks smile and stare, but the ungenial coalition of barbarous with refined phrases will prevent you in the end from being so generally tasted, as you deserve to be. Excuse my freedom, and take the same liberty with my puns .

I send you two little volumes of my spare hours. They are of all sorts, there is a methodist hymn for Sundays, and a farce for Saturday night. Pray give them a place on your shelf. Pray accept a little volume, of which I have duplicate, that I may return in an equal number to your welcome presents—

I think I am indebted to you for a sonnet in the London for August.

Since I saw you I have been in France, and have eaten frogs. The nicest little rabbity things you ever tasted. Do look about for them. Make Mrs. Clare pick off the hind quarters, boil them plain, with parsley and butter. The four fore quarters are not so good. She may let them hop off by themselves. Yours sincerely, Cha s Lamb.

THE ESSAYS OF ELIA

"Shakespeare himself might have read them and Hamlet have acted them; for truly was our excellent friend of the genuine line of Yorick." Thus it was that Leigh Hunt referred to the essays which without doubt stand as the most characteristic of Charles Lamb's contributions to literature. His reputation, as was recognized and acknowledged within a few years of his death, "will ultimately rest on the Essays of Elia, than which our literature rejoices in few things finer."

The intimate footing upon which he puts himself and his reader, is perhaps not so much a peculiarity of his own as it is the dominant note always in the work of your born essayist. He discourses high truth or fresh philosophy, truest poetry, richest wit, or the most delicate humour, he presents personal experiences with that simplicity of pure camaraderie which assumes that the reader could do the same—if he had the mind, as Lamb himself put it when wittily snubbing Wordsworth. In most books, as De Quincey has pointed out, the author figures as a mere abstraction, "without sex or age or local station," whom the reader banishes from his thoughts, but [70] in the case of Lamb and that brilliant line of authors to which he belongs, we must know something of the man himself, and as I have said earlier, we get it abundantly scattered up and down his writings. Even if we do not happen to be acquainted with the actual biography, we can build up in our minds on reading the essays of Elia a life story not far removed from actuality, though it would be wanting in any hint of tragedy. It is this intimacy which at once attracts and repels readers, attracts all those who are, in however small a degree, kindred spirits, and repels, perhaps, others. The quaintness, oddity, flippancy, are wrought together with deep thought, poetry, and feeling to a wonderful degree. The very diversity of theme and manner—this varying change from grave to gay, from lively to severe—is indeed but a reflection of life itself, which with the most fortunate of us dashes our smiles with tears, and even to the most unfortunate imparts something of pleasure and delight.

The "Essays of Elia" may fittingly be dealt with as at once the most representative and the finest of his writings. Great as is the range of their subjects, it will be found that they are more or less unified by the author's individuality both in point of view and in treatment, that they are all informed with what has been termed Lamb's calm and self-reposing spirit, that they are all more or less strongly marked by that style which, based upon a loving study of the Elizabethan and seventeenth-century writers, was yet for the most [71] part distinguished by concision and ease. He took from his models their richness of language without their prolixity, their felicity of expression without their tendency to the elaboration of conceits; he unconsciously employed their varied styles, to form an individual style of his own.

It is only possible in one small section of a small volume such as this to indicate a portion of the wealth in the Elia series, so varied are the themes which inspired the essayist: the delicious drollery of the "Dissertation upon Roast Pig"; the immortal characterization of "Mrs. Battle's Opinions upon Whist"; the pleasant personal touches in a score of the essays; the cry of stifled affection in "Dream Children"; the whimsicality of "Popular Fallacies"; each of these, and as many again unspecified might be made the subject of separate comment. Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia. In the opening essay—the first of the series to appear in the "London Magazine," the one to stand in the forefront of the volume—Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a literary gem. Lamb pictures "The South Sea House" as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier—he speaks of it as forty years. There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with [72] some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials. Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame:

He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich! Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood—much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day—to the illustrious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen.

Then at the close Elia says, "Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while—peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic—insubstantial—like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being. Their importance is from the past." The names may have been mostly fantastic—in one case we know that it was not, for "Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters" is known to delvers among dead books—the types are immortal. In this first essay we find in such sentences as "their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of cyphers," an illustration of Lamb's wonderful use of what an antipathetic critic might term an informal superfluity of syllables.

The next essay, reflecting the atmosphere of "Oxford in the Vacation," was written presumably during a holiday visit to the University of Cambridge, though Elia touching upon matters concerning church holidays breaks off with—

... 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 mighty Bodley.

Then follows a passage eminently characteristic of Elia's happy manner of playing with a theme:

I can here play the gentleman, enact the student To such a one as myself, who has been defrauded [74] in his young years of the sweet food of academic institution, nowhere is so pleasant to while away a few idle weeks at one or other of the universities. Their vacation, too, at this time of the year, falls in pat with ours . Here I can take my walks unmolested, and fancy myself of what degree of 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 curtsey 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.

The walks at these times are so much one's own—the tall trees of Christ's, the groves of Magdalen! The halls deserted, and with open doors inviting one to slip in unperceived, and pay a devoir to some Founder or noble or royal Benefactress (that should have been ours), whose portrait seems to smile upon their over-looked beadsman, and to adopt me for their own. Then, to take a peep in by the way at the butteries, and sculleries, redolent of antique hospitality: the immense caves of kitchens, kitchen fire-places, cordial recesses; ovens whose first pies were baked four centuries ago; and spits which have cooked for Chaucer! Not the meanest minister among the dishes but is hallowed to me through his imagination, and the Cook goes forth a Manciple.

The next essay, "Christ's Hospital Five and [75] Thirty Years Ago," should be read along with an earlier one, which does not belong actually to the Elia series, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital." In the later essay Lamb affected to look at the school as it might have been to a scholar less fortunately circumstanced than himself, a boy far from his family and friends, and the boy whom he selected was that one of his school companions whom he knew best and with whom in manhood he had sustained the closest friendship—S. T. Coleridge. That friend he thus apostrophizes in a passage which has frequently been quoted:

Come back into memory, like as thou wert in the day-spring of thy fancies, with hope like a fiery column before thee—the dark pillar not yet turned—Samuel Taylor Coleridge—Logician, Metaphysician, Bard! How have I seen the casual passer through the Cloisters stand still, entranced with admiration (while he weighed the disproportion between the speech and the garb of the young Mirandula), to hear thee unfold, in thy deep and sweet intonations, the mysteries of Jamblichus or Plotinus (for even in those years thou waxedst not pale at such philosophic draughts), or reciting Homer in his Greek, or Pindar, while the walls of the old Grey Friars re-echoed to the accents of the inspired charity-boy!

"The Two Races of Men," divides men into those who borrow and those who lend, the theme being followed out with great humour, and going on to those "whose treasures are rather cased in leather covers than closed in iron coffers," and then giving pleasant bits about Coleridge—under [76] his nomme de guerre of Comberbatch—and his theory that "the title to property in a book ... is in exact ratio to the claimant's powers of understanding and appreciating the same." "Should he go on acting upon this theory," adds Elia, "which of our shelves is safe?"

"New Year's Eve" suggests a train of reflections—not, in the platitudinous manner of looking back over the errors of the past year and making good resolutions for the coming one—but on mortality generally, and on the passing of time and the passing of life:

I am not content to pass away like a weaver's shuttle! These metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity; and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitude, and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacle here. I am content to stand still at the age to which I am arrived; I and my friends; to be no younger, no richer, no handsomer. I do not want to be weaned by age; or drop like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave.

Next comes the immortal "Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist,"—Mrs. Battle, whose wish for "a clear fire, a clean hearth, and the rigour of the game" has become almost proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten. In "A Chapter [77] on Ears," Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in "All Fool's Day" he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, "and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."

"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a passage such as this:

More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive. You have bathed with stillness—O, when the spirit is sore fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tran [78] quil and herd-like—as in the pasture—'forty feeding like one.'"

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master

is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of a school-master are coarse or thin.

The next essay—the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had not appeared in the "London Magazine"—is a pretty bit about "Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life—without success—to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will [79] attend. This would of itself be sufficient to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."

"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 [80] 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:

Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis. What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time—the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden, that goodly pile

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places. What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic! What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions, seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light! How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep! [82]

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial! It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens. Why is it almost everywhere vanished?

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives: "They are, in truth, but shadows of fact—verisimilitudes, not verities—or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history."

Dealing with "Grace Before Meat" Elia takes up an unconventional position and defends it with spirit. It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a "grace" is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful. Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and criticism, contrasting—from Milton's "Paradise Lost"—the feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with "the temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer."

With "My First Play" Elia returned to one of those autobiographic themes in which he is so often at his happiest. He represents the emotions of the child of six or seven at the theatre and contrasts them with those that follow when the [83] child has reached his teens. "At school all play-going was inhibited." He concludes, and, most readers will agree, concludes with justice, that "we differ from ourselves less at sixty and sixteen, than the latter does from six."

"Dream Children," again, has much in it of the story of the writer's childhood, blent with sorrow over his brother's recent death and interwoven with a fanciful imagining of what might have been. Elia pictures himself talking to his two children of his own childhood's days when visiting grandmother Field:

When suddenly, turning to Alice, the soul of the first Alice looked out at her eyes with such a reality of re-presentment, that I became in doubt which of them stood there before me, or whose that bright hair was; and while I stood gazing, both the children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding, and still receding till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me the effects of speech: "We are not of Alice, nor of thee, nor are we children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name"—and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair, where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget unchanged by my side—but John L. (or James Elia) was gone for ever.

This little essay, the most beautiful of the series, is as essentially pathetic as anything in [84] our literature, bringing tears to the eyes at every reading though known almost by heart.

The essay on "Distant Correspondents," in the form of a playful epistle to a friend, B. F. ( i.e. , Barron Field, also a contributor to the "London Magazine") has much that is characteristic of the writer. In it he plays—as he does in other letters to distant friends—on the way in which "this confusion of tenses, this grand solecism of two presents" renders writing difficult; in it he airs his fondness for a pun and enlarges upon the fugacity of that form of fun, its inherent incapacity for travel; and in it, too, he gives some indication—we have several such indications in his letters—of his fondness for hoaxing his friends with invented news about other friends, or with questions on supposititious problems set forth as actualities.

The next essay, "The Praise of Chimney-Sweepers," might be cited as one of those most fully representing the characteristics of Lamb's work as essayist. It has its touches of personal reminiscences, it deals with an out-of-the-way subject in a surprisingly engaging manner, and it is full of those quaint turns of expression, those more or less recondite words which Elia re-introduced from the older writers, Jeremy Taylor, Sir Thomas Browne, etc., as he had re-introduced the dramatic writings of the seventeenth century. Here is a passage which may be said to be thoroughly representative at once of Elia's manner of looking at things, as well as his own manner of describing them. Elia is discussing "Saloop." [85]

I know not by what particular conformation of the organ it happens, but I have always found that this composition is surprisingly gratifying to the palate of a young chimney-sweeper—whether the oily particles (sassafras is slightly oleaginous) do attenuate and soften the fuliginous concretions, which are sometimes found (in dissections) to adhere to the roof of the mouth in these unfledged practitioners; or whether Nature, sensible that she had mingled too much of bitter wood in the lot of these raw victims, caused to grow out of the earth her sassafras for a sweet lenitive; but so it is, that no possible taste or odour to the senses of a young chimney-sweeper can convey a delicate excitement comparable to this mixture. Being penniless, they will yet hang their black heads over the ascending steam, to gratify one sense if possible, seemingly no less pleased than those domestic animals—cats—when they purr over a new-found sprig of valerian. There is something more in these sympathies than philosophy can inculcate.

In this essay also we have an example—one of how many!—of Lamb's happiness in hitting upon an illustration, even though it be of the ludicrous; mentioning the wonderful white of the sweep-boy's teeth he adds, "It is, as when

"A Dissertation upon Roast Pig" is perhaps the most widely known of all the essays of Elia. Its delightful drollery, its very revelling in the daintiness of sucking-pig, its wonderfully rich literary presentation, its deliberate acceptance of [86] wild improbability as historic basis, all unite to give it special place in the regard of readers. The theme is of course familiar. It is that of a small Chinese boy playing with fire who burnt down his father's flimsy hut so that a whole litter of piglings was roasted in the conflagration. The boy touched one of the incinerated little ones to feel if it were alive; burnt his fingers and applied them to his mouth. His father returned and did the same, and thus roast sucking-pig became a new dish. Lamb plays with his subject with an inimitable mock earnestness.

Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims. We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom. The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs. It looks like refining a violet. Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice. It might impart a gusto.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his fingers and [87] applied them to his mouth—with precisely the same sequel which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.

"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a delicate—perhaps partly ironical—description of a bachelor's objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage—partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors, "On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death, open with a "Character of the late Elia"—an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the essays, "Blakesmoor in H——shire," the author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "noble Marble Hall, with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Cæsars—stately busts in marble—ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn. The open [88] ing passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's contemplative mood:

I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good, whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants, weave for us illusions, incompatible with the bustle of modern occupancy, and vanities of foolish present aristocracy. The same difference of feeling, I think, attends us between entering an empty and a crowded church. In the latter it is chance but some present human frailty—an act of inattention on the part of some of the auditory—or a trait of affectation, or worse, vain-glory on that of the preacher—puts us by our best thoughts, disharmonizing the place and the occasion. But wouldst thou know the beauty of holiness? go alone on some week-day, borrowing the keys of good Master Sexton, traverse the cool aisles of some country church: think of the piety that has kneeled there—the congregations, old and young, that have found consolation there—the meek pastor, the docile parishioner. With no disturbing emotions, no cross conflicting comparisons, drink in the tranquillity of the place, till thou thyself become as fixed and motionless as the marble effigies that kneel and weep around thee.

"Poor Relations" is a beautiful example of humour—provoking to smiles while touching to tears—with a wonderful introductory piling up of definitions: "A Poor Relation—is the most irrelevant thing in nature,—a piece of impertinent correspondency,—a preposterous shadow, [89] lengthening in the noontide of your prosperity,—an unwelcome remembrancer," and so on. "This theme of poor relations is replete with so much matter for tragic as well as comic associations that it is difficult to keep the account distinct without blending." The essay includes three or four admirable examples of Elia's felicity in drawing typical characters with just that touch of oddity that makes them live as individuals. The theatre which we have seen always made its triple appeal to Lamb—from the study, from the front, and from the boards—inspired the next three essays, "Stage Illusions," "To the Shade of Elliston," and "Ellistoniana." The first is an example of subtle criticism showing how it is that we get enjoyment out of unlovely attributes on the stage, thanks to the "exquisite art of the actor in a perpetual sub-insinuation to us," that things are not altogether what they seem to be. In the two essays on Elliston we have at once an eloquent tribute to a stage-magnate of his day and a fine character portrait.

"Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading," might be cited as one of the most characteristic of the essays of Elia. It illustrates the writer's happiest style, and indicates his taste. In its opening passages are words and phrases which have become quotations "familiar in the mouth as household words" to all book-lovers. Lamb takes as his text a remark made by Lord Foppington in Vanbrugh's "Relapse": "To mind the inside of a book is to entertain one's [90] self with the forced products of another man's brain. Now I think a man of quality and breeding may be much amused with the natural sprouts of his own."

An ingenious acquaintance was so much struck with this bright sally of his Lordship, that he has left off reading altogether, to the great improvement of his originality. At the hazard of losing some credit on this head, I must confess that I dedicate no inconsiderable portion of my time to other people's thoughts. I dream away my life in others' speculations. I love to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.

I have no repugnances. Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low. I can read anything which I call a book . There are things in that shape which I cannot allow for such.

In this catalogue of books which are no books — biblia a-biblia —I reckon Court Calendars, Directories, Pocket Books, Draught Boards, bound and lettered on the back, Scientific Treatises, Almanacks, Statutes at Large; the works of Hume, Gibbon, Robertson, Beattie, Soame Jenyns, and, generally, all those volumes which "no gentleman's library should be without"; the Histories of Flavius Josephus (that learned Jew), and Paley's "Moral Philosophy." With these exceptions, I can read almost anything. I bless my stars for a taste so catholic, so unexcluding.

I confess that it moves my spleen to see these things in books' clothing perched upon shelves, like false saints, usurpers of true shrines, intruders into the sanctuary, thrusting out the legitimate occupants. To reach down a well-bound semblance of a volume, and hope it some kind-hearted playbook; [91] then, opening what "seem its leaves," to come bolt upon a withering Population Essay. To expect a Steele, or a Farquhar, and find—Adam Smith; to view a well-arranged assortment of block-headed Encyclopædias (Anglicanas or Metropolitanas) set out in an array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios; would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund Lully to look himself again in the world. I never see these impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged veterans in their spoils.

He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books; the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read: "I should not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone and reading 'Candide'!"—"The Old Margate Hoy" gives reminiscences of a visit to the popular resort—with some uncomplimentary asides at Hastings—in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged his pen in his conversational fondness for a pun:

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of sickness, yet far enough removed from the [92] terra firma of established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me, requesting—an article. In articulo mortis , thought I; but it is something hard—and the quibble, wretched as it was, relieved me.

In the "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line—

and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by the greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: "It is impossible for the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare."

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks familiar as in his native paths. He ascends the empyrean heaven, and is not intoxicated. He treads the burning marl without dismay; he wins his flight without self-loss through realms of chaos "and old night." Or if, abandoning himself to that severer chaos of a "human mind untuned," he is content awhile to be mad with Lear, or to hate mankind (a sort of madness) with Timon; neither is that madness, nor this misanthropy, so unchecked, but that—never letting the reins of reason wholly go, while most he seems to do so—he has his better genius whispering at his ear, with the good servant Kent suggesting saner counsels; or with the honest steward Flavius recommending kindlier resolutions. [93] Where he seems most to recede from humanity, he will be found the truest to it.

"Captain Jackson" is an unforgettable picture of a poor man who would not be poor; his manners made a plated spoon appear as silver sugar-tongs, a homely bench a sofa, and so on. As Elia concludes:

There is some merit in putting a handsome face upon indigent circumstances. To bully and swagger away the sense of them before strangers, may not always be discommendable. Tibbs and Bobadil, even when detected, have more of our admiration than contempt. But for a man to put the cheat upon himself; to play the Bobadil at home; and, steeped in poverty up to the lips, to fancy himself all the while chin-deep in riches, is a strain of constitutional philosophy, and a mastery over fortune, which was reserved for my old friend Captain Jackson.

With the next essay of this collection, that on "The Superannuated Man," we come to one of the most notable of the series of Elia's transmutations of matters of private experience into precious literature. The paper is as autobiographic as any of his letters: some slight changes—as of the East India House to the name of a city firm—are made, but for the rest it is a record of his retirement with a revelation of the feelings attendant upon the change from having to go daily to an office for thirty-six years to being suddenly free:

For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed. I could only apprehend my felicity; I [94] was too confused to taste it sincerely. I wandered about, thinking I was happy and knowing that I was not. I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years' confinement. I could scarce trust myself with myself. It was like passing out of Time into Eternity—for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself. It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage. From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me. And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it. I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition. I am in no hurry. Having all holidays, I am as though I had none. If Time hung heavy upon me I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them. If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters. I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me. I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me. I am like the man

"The Genteel Style in Writing" is a delightful [95] enforcement of the "ordinary criticism" that "my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing," though Elia prefers to differentiate them as "the lordly and the gentlemanly." The essay is, for the most part, a plea, with illustrations, for a consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and engaging writer. "Barbara S——" is a slight anecdote expanded into a sympathetic little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back and received the moiety.

"The Tombs in the Abbey" is an indignant protest—in the form of a letter to Southey—against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's Cathedral, except during service times, to all but those who could afford to pay for admission; it closes with a touch of humour where Elia suggests that the Abbey had been closed because the statue of Major André had been disfigured, and adds: "The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there. Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic?" Then, in "Amicus Redivivus," we have an accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly into the New River opposite Lamb's very door, made to supply matter for treatment in Elia's pleasantest vein.

"Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sydney" gives a dozen of Sidney's sonnets with appreciatory comment. "Newspapers Thirty Years Ago" is particularly interesting for its reminiscences of the days when Lamb wrote half a dozen daily [96] jests for "The Morning Post" at sixpence per jest, and for its sketches of Daniel Stuart and Fenwick, two diversely typical journalists of a century since. "Barrenness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art" is a criticism of the prevailing taste in art matters, inspired by Martin's "Belshazzar's Feast," and contrasts the modern methods of painting as—a Dryad, "a beautiful naked figure recumbent under wide-stretched oaks" (a figure that with a different background would do just as well as a Naiad), with the older method illustrated by Julio Romano's dryad, in which was "an approximation of two natures." "Rejoicings Upon the New Year's Coming of Age" is a graceful, sparkling piece of humorous fancy:

I should have told you, that cards of invitation had been issued. The carriers were the Hours ; twelve little, merry whirligig foot-pages, as you should desire to see, that went all round, and found out the persons invited well enough, with the exception of Easter Day , Shrove Tuesday , and a few such Moveables , who had lately shifted their quarters.

Well, they all met at last, foul Days , fine Days , all sorts of Days , and a rare din they made of it. There was nothing but, Hail! fellow Day ,—well met—brother Day —sister Day ,—only Lady Day kept a little on the aloof, and seemed somewhat scornful. Yet some said Twelfth Day cut her out and out, for she came in a tiffany suit, all white and gold, like a queen on a frost-cake—all royal, glittering, and Epiphanous . The rest came—some in green, some in white—but old Lent and his family [97] were not yet out of mourning. Rainy Days came in, dripping; and sun-shiny Days helped them to change their stockings. Wedding Day was there in his marriage finery, a little the worse for wear. Pay Day came late, as he always does; and Doomsday sent word—he might be expected.

"The Wedding" describes such a ceremony at which Elia had assisted, and illustrates at once his sympathy with the young people and with their parents—"is there not something untender, to say no more of it, in the hurry which a beloved child is in to tear herself from the paternal stock and commit herself to strange graftings." "The Child Angel" is a beautiful poetic apologue in the form of a dream.

In "Old China," one of the most attractive of this varied series, Elia is ready with reminiscences of the days when the purchase of the books, pictures, or old china that they loved, meant a real sacrifice, and the things purchased were therefore the more deeply prized.

Do you remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you, till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare—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 [98] 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 daybreak—was there no pleasure in being a poor man? or can those neat black clothes 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 overworn 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.

When you came home with twenty apologies for laying out a less number of shillings upon that print after Lionardo, which we christened the "Lady Blanch"; when you looked at the purchase, and thought of the money,—and thought of the money, and looked again at the picture—was there no pleasure in being a poor man? Now, you have nothing to do but walk into Colnaghi's, and buy a wilderness of Lionardos. Yet do you?

"Confessions of a Drunkard" and "Popular Fallacies" complete the tale of the "Essays of Elia" that were collected into volume form as such. The first-named essay had been issued originally in 1813. It is an attempt to set forth from a drunkard's point of view the evils of drunkenness, and was first published in a peri [99] odical with a purpose over twenty years before its inclusion in the second edition of the "Last Essays of Elia." To accentuate the fact that it was purely a literary performance—an attempt to project himself into the mind of a drunkard willing to allow others to profit by his example—Lamb reprinted it in the "London Magazine" as one of his ordinary contributions. There have not been wanting matter-of-fact people (with whom our Elia has recorded his imperfect sympathy) who have accepted this essay as pure biography; because details tally with the author's life they think the whole must do so. We have but to follow the story of Lamb's life with understanding to realize how wrong is this impression. The closing dozen of essays in brief, grouped under the title of "Popular Fallacies," discuss certain familiar axioms and show them—in the light of fun and fancy—to be wholly fallacious.

Such is the variety of those two volumes which by common consent—by popular appreciation and by critical judgement—have their place as Lamb's most characteristic work. Throughout both series we find delicate unconventionality, the same choice of subjects from among the simplest suggestions of everyday life, lifted by his method of treatment, his manner of looking at and treating things, out of the sphere of every day into that of all days. However simple may be the subject chosen it is always made peculiarly his own.

The style is the man. The rule was thus confined within the compass of a brief sentence by a distinguished French naturalist, and if there be examples which form exceptions to that rule, Charles Lamb is certainly not one of them. Markedly individual himself he reveals that individuality in his writings so strongly that there are not wanting critics who consider themselves able to decide from the turn of a phrase or the use of a word whether Lamb did or did not write any particular piece of work which it may have been sought to father on him. In the manner of presentation of his writings we have at once the revelation of catholic literary taste and wide reading combined with the deep seriousness and the almost irresponsible whimsicality of the man himself. The man who was loved by all who knew him in the flesh—so true is it that le style c'est l'homme —reveals himself as a man to be loved by those who can only know him through the medium of the written word. Where he has given rein to his fancy or his imagination, he is humorous, whimsical, inventive; where he is dealing with matters of serious fact or criticism he is simple, clear, and to the point. Quotations already given would go to illustrate this, but two [101] further contrasting passages may be added. The first is from "Table Talk," the second from a critical essay on the acting of Shakespeare's tragedies.

It is a desideratum in works that treat de re culinaria , that we have no rationale of sauces, or theory of mixed flavours; as to show why cabbage is reprehensible with roast beef, laudable with bacon; why the haunch of mutton seeks the alliance of currant jelly, the shoulder civilly declineth it; why a loin of veal (a pretty problem), being itself unctuous, seeketh the adventitious lubricity of melted butter; and why the same part in pork, not more oleaginous, abhorreth it; why the French bean sympathizes with the flesh of deer; why salt fish points to parsnip, brawn makes a dead set at mustard; why cats prefer valerian to heartsease, old ladies vice versa —though this is rather travelling out of the road of the dietetics, and may be thought a question more curious than relevant; why salmon (a strong sapor per se ) fortifieth its condition with the mighty lobster sauce, whose embraces are fatal to the delicater relish of the turbot; why oysters in death rise up against the contamination of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash—she not yet decidedly declaring for either. We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.

So to see Lear acted—to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting. We want to take him into shelter and relieve him. That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear [102] ever produced on me. But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted. The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear: they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo's terrible figures. The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual: the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches. It is his mind which is laid bare. This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it. On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage: while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear—we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind. What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that "they themselves are old"? What gesture shall we appropriate to this? What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?

Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, [103] close a sonnet which he addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words. With the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters. With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of "The Religio Medici" and of "The Anatomy of Melancholy," in diverse ways in his prose. Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression. As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature of the past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that writer in the past most likely to have made it his own. This is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it. "For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few English writers who have written so differently on different themes." Placing special emphasis on his favourites—which besides the three named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance—it may be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style, though it must be remembered—it cannot be forgotten with a volume of his essays or letters in hand—that there is always that marked but indescribable "individuality of manner" which pervades the varied whole. [104]

Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the essay in which he—not very felicitously—brackets Elia and Geoffrey Crayon in the "Spirit of the Age," says:

He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist. He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions. His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes. Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind.

That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the best of English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was always in pure literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those who love things of the mind which can only be passed from generation to generation by means of books. In this we may recognize the reason—wholly unconscious to the writer—for the allusiveness of his style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or passage to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such allusiveness was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient classics; but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne. [105]

Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts. In one of his early letters to Coleridge where he mentions having just finished reading Chapman's Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a phrase in that translation, says with gusto, "what endless egression of phrases the dog commands." The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of it. He had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding words that had passed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of re-introducing them to enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it naturally, even as though inevitably, and without any such air of coxcombical affectation as would have destroyed the flavour of the whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the thought and modes of expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods that his use of obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite unconscious.

The egotism of Elia's style in addressing his readers has been said to be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be little doubt that it was so—but only in a [106] measure, for it is something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the natural attitude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not from self-consciousness but from the lack of it. In putting his opinions and experiences in the first person, we feel that Lamb did so almost unconsciously, because it was for him the easiest way of expressing himself. It was not, in fact, egotism at all in the commonly accepted sense of meaning, too frequent or self-laudatory use of the personal pronoun.

CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF WORKS

Those books with an asterisk against their date were only in part the work of Charles Lamb.

II. Posthumous Works and Collected Editions

Iii. biography and criticism.

See entries under 1837 and 1848, etc., in preceding section.

The above list does not include separate editions of the "Essays" and other works; most of Lamb's writings are obtainable to-day in cheap and convenient forms.

Charles Lamb: Essays

By charles lamb, charles lamb: essays summary and analysis of "old china".

"Old China" opens with a bashful admission that Elia has an affection for old china. When he enters a new house, he always asks to see its china collection first. And while he is fixated on old china, he can't quite remember the first time that that he became aware of its existence.

He then goes on to describe the various scenes that one can find emblazoned in blue on a white background. Elia speaks in mystifying terms of figures floating above the ground in their depicted scenes, of men with women's faces, and of an illustration of a tea ceremony that concludes in a woman entering a boat with one foot stepping off a grassy riverbed.

One afternoon while Elia is drinking Hyson tea with his cousin Bridget, he remarks on china they're drinking from—a set he just bought recently. He reflects on their good fortune in recent years, and how they can afford such luxuries now. But Elia sees a look of disagreement on Bridget's face, and she launches into a monologue questioning the extent to which they can actually appreciate this china now that it's financially easily within reach.

She recalls a time from their past when they were poorer, when Elia held off on buying a new suit when his old one was looking shabby because he bought a book that Elia and Bridget had to rebind and repair. Now he never brings her any gifts, much less a dilapidated book. She recalls when they used to go for picnics and ask people to borrow a table cloth, and when they used to sit in the rafters when seeing a play, even though Elia would now only attend one sitting in the pit.

Bridget reminds him of the foods they used to eat that they considered luxuries, such as strawberries early in the season. Now, she says, anything they could treat themselves to above their typical means would be a greedy indulgence. She asks whether perhaps they were happier when they were poorer, if they could better enjoy those ephemeral pleasures, and whether they are now too easily satisfied by anything they can afford.

Elia responds that perhaps they were happier when they were poorer, but notes that they were also younger then. The fact that things were harder when they were younger should make them appreciate their current lot even more. Desiring those old, poorer days to return is a fantasy. Instead, Elia suggests, they should focus on the fantasy tableau portrayed in the china they're holding.

"Old China" is often considered something of a riddle amongst Lamb's essays, as it drifts into a memory in a similarly fluid manner that Elia drifts into the tea ceremony scene that he gazes at in the piece of china earlier in the story. In both the case of the scene in the china and his conversation with Bridget, drinking tea opens a door to a speculative kind of reflection. A parallel can be drawn here with the famous madeleine cookie that the protagonist of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time tastes right before he's catapulted into a vast landscape of memory.

At the heart of the essay is a meditation on class. The essay begins with Elia speaking of the "great houses" he enters—meaning homes of the wealthy—and he is clearly infatuated with the material trappings of the wealthy's lifestyle. Bridget, on the other hand, invites him to remember a time when they couldn't even afford to buy a table cloth to throw a picnic with. This class discourse speaks to a tension in British life at the time just before the Victorian period when the gulf between the rich and poor was about to explode.

Additionally worth noting here is Lamb's use of ekphrasis, a literary device in which writing describes a piece of art. Here, the description of china both helps draw us into the essay by sparking our visual imagination and helps characterize Elia himself, as we learn about his fixation on the masculine/feminine dichotomy and the dandyish pleasure he takes from enjoying the finer things in life. The description of the scene in the tea cup also primes the reader for another kind of reflection, one equally rooted in a character's imagination.

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Charles Lamb: Essays Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Charles Lamb: Essays is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Which quality Charles Lamb a romantic writer?

As a Romantic, Lamb brought a key innovation to the somewhat new form, inserting his own personally to give the essays a conversational tone. His essays showcase his passions and anxieties, imbuing the non-fiction form with a personal and literary...

What is the major theme of "Poor Relation" by Charles Lamb?

The major theme is that of the "poor relation"... their irrelevance and unpleasant place in one's life.

Explain the theme of the essay ''A Dissertation upon Roast Pig''.

The essay describes the discovery of the exquisite flavour of roast pig in China in a time when all food was eaten raw. This is really a light hearted theme speaking to how odd it is that humans eat cooked animals at all.

Study Guide for Charles Lamb: Essays

Charles Lamb: Essays study guide contains a biography of Charles Lamb, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

About Charles Lamb: Essays
Charles Lamb: Essays Summary
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Essays for Charles Lamb: Essays

Charles Lamb: Essays essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Charles Lamb: Essays by Charles Lamb.

Charles Lamb and Spaces Separate from Rationality

Wikipedia Entries for Charles Lamb: Essays

Introduction
Youth and schooling
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Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

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340 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1823

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Dream Children

Read our complete study guide on the essay “Dream Children” by Charles Lamb. Our study guide covers Dream Children by Charles Lamb summary and analysis.

Dream Children by Charles Lamb Summary

Lamb opens the essay “Dream Children” by the narrating the story of his grandmother, Mrs. Field to his children, Alice and John. Lamb’s grandmother, his children’s great-grandmother, lived in a ‘great house in Norfolk’. This house was a hundred times bigger than the house they are living presently.

Lamb narrates to his children the story of the tragic scene that had been carved out in the wood upon chimney-piece of the great hall in the great house of his grandmother, however, this wood chimney was then replaced by a marble chimney by the owner. Mrs. Filed, Lamb’s grandmother, was not the real owner of the house, however, due to her kind and humble behavior and her great religious devotion had turned everybody to respect her. The owner of the house hired her as the caretaker and handed over it to her while he himself lived in another house. Mrs. Field lived in the great-house as if it was her own. Later on, the precious ornaments of the great-house were shifted to the real owner’s house, however, they didn’t suit the modern house.

Furthermore, Lamb tells his children about his grandmother’s death and funeral that was attended by a large number of people, both poor and rich. Even people from many miles around had come to express their condolences and respect toward her. Mrs. Field was very humble and pious women who knew Psalms and a great part of Testament by heart.

Lamb then starts telling his children about their grandmother’s youth. She was tall, upright with a graceful personality. She was the best dancer in the country until cancer attacked her and deprived her of her skill, however, this disease couldn’t take her good spirits. Furthermore, Lamb tells Alice and John of how his grandmother used to sleep alone in an isolated chamber of the house. Also, she believed that she saw two infant ghosts in the midnight, however, she was also sure that these were decent mortals that wouldn’t hurt her. Although his maid slept with him, Lamb was quite frightened of the ghosts as he was not as religious as his grandmother.

Furthermore, Lamb told his children about their great-grandmother’s love and affection towards her grandchildren. Lamb, along with his siblings and cousins, visited his grandmother in holidays where they, particularly he, spend most of the hours gazing around the old sculptors of the Emperors of Rome.

He would gaze them as much as the sculptures would appear to him living or else he would turn marble; moreover, he would roam around in the mansion without getting tired. He would use to be alone while roaming around in the empty rooms, worn-out tapering etc. unless a lonely gardener would cross him. He would also roam about the gardens, scrutinizing at the vegetation and flowers. He was more satisfied in spending his holidays like this and preferred it over the usual habits of children and sweet aromas of peaches and nectarines.

Lamb, now, tells his children about their uncle John Lamb. Lamb’s grandmother would love her all grandchildren, however, she had a special affection for John. John was a brave, handsome, and spirited man. He had a unique sort of personality. For instance, others like Charles Lamb would corner themselves, whereas John would use to mount on horses, tour around the village, and would merge with hunters. John, with the passage of time, being brave, earned respect and admiration of almost everyone in the family and out of the family as well.

John was a few years elder than Charles Lamb. John would carry Lamb, who was lame-footed, on his back for many miles when he was unable to walk. However, John, in the afterlife, became lame-footed. Lamb still dreads that he had not been sympathetic enough to endure the intolerant discomforts of John or even to recall his youth when he was supported by John. However, when John passed away, Lamb would miss him so much. He reminisced his gentleness and his pettiness and desired him to be alive again. He wanted him to alive again so that he could fight with him again. Lamb felt as uneasy without him as the poor John felt when the doctor took off his limb.

The children at this point start mourning for their deceased uncle and demand Lamb to proceed by narrating something about their dead mother. Then he started narrating them how for the period long seven years he (Lamb) uncomplainingly dated the beautiful Alice Winterton. When Lamb was narrating his experiences with his wife, he suddenly realizes that the old Alice is communicating with him through the eyes of little Alice sitting in front of him. As Lamb sustain to stare it appears that his children, John and Alice, are disappearing from him.

Finally, the two desolate structures are left out of them saying him that they are neither of Alice nor of you, they are not children at all. The children of Alice calls Bartram father. Hence, they are merely dreams. Suddenly, Lamb wakes up and finds himself in the bachelor arm-chair where he has fallen asleep with the loyal Bridget by his side.

Dream Children by Charles Lamb Literary Analysis

Charles Lamb, the shining star in the sky of essay writing, was born on February 10, 1775. He is the world predominant a renown English poet, essayist and antiquarian. His essays are considered to be the finest among the English prose work. He is appreciated for his genial humor, humanity, wisdom and profound pathos that is reflected in his writings. Essays of Elia was the first volume of his essays that was published in 1828 while the second volume of his essays, named, The Last Essays of Elia was published in 1833. His essays have a unique combination of wit, reflection, anecdote, and fancy. He died on December 27, 1834.

The essay “ Dream Children” is a narrative essay in which the author, Charles Lamb narrates the story of his dream that he had. In this dream, he came across his dream children that diminish at the end of the dream.

This essay exhibits the subjects of pain and guilt of getting deprived of the people whom we loved from the core of our heart. In this essay, the author is brought in a dream world to reveal the sweet recollections of the past days. The essay, being enhanced with despair, clarifies the worth and necessity of childhood and the loved ones for an individual, without whom the life appears to be dark and suffocating for the individual.

The reaction and response the children in the essay reflect the effect of the story on their mind and turns the essay dramatic. Moreover, their actions were proof that the story that has been narrated to then have a great influence on them and were moved by their father’s description.

There is a shift in the tone of the essay at various points. The shifts in the tone, from humorous to tragic, occurred when the author describes the scene of his grandmother and beloved brother death. Lamb appears to be nostalgic throughout the essay and longed for his loved ones. He is depressed at the death of his beloved Alice and feels guilty for not marrying her.

Towards the end of the essay, a twist in the essay comes when all the events in the story turn out to be a dream. This adds suspense to the essay along with an open end.

Edited by: Dinah Birch

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Essays of Elia, The

Miscellaneous essays by Charles *Lamb, of which the first series appeared in the *London Magazine between 1820 and ... ...

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Illustration of a missile made from words.

In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.

By Zadie Smith

A philosophy without a politics is common enough. Aesthetes, ethicists, novelists—all may be easily critiqued and found wanting on this basis. But there is also the danger of a politics without a philosophy. A politics unmoored, unprincipled, which holds as its most fundamental commitment its own perpetuation. A Realpolitik that believes itself too subtle—or too pragmatic—to deal with such ethical platitudes as thou shalt not kill. Or: rape is a crime, everywhere and always. But sometimes ethical philosophy reënters the arena, as is happening right now on college campuses all over America. I understand the ethics underpinning the protests to be based on two widely recognized principles:

There is an ethical duty to express solidarity with the weak in any situation that involves oppressive power.

If the machinery of oppressive power is to be trained on the weak, then there is a duty to stop the gears by any means necessary.

The first principle sometimes takes the “weak” to mean “whoever has the least power,” and sometimes “whoever suffers most,” but most often a combination of both. The second principle, meanwhile, may be used to defend revolutionary violence, although this interpretation has just as often been repudiated by pacifistic radicals, among whom two of the most famous are, of course, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . In the pacifist’s interpretation, the body that we must place between the gears is not that of our enemy but our own. In doing this, we may pay the ultimate price with our actual bodies, in the non-metaphorical sense. More usually, the risk is to our livelihoods, our reputations, our futures. Before these most recent campus protests began, we had an example of this kind of action in the climate movement. For several years now, many people have been protesting the economic and political machinery that perpetuates climate change, by blocking roads, throwing paint, interrupting plays, and committing many other arrestable offenses that can appear ridiculous to skeptics (or, at the very least, performative), but which in truth represent a level of personal sacrifice unimaginable to many of us.

I experienced this not long ago while participating in an XR climate rally in London. When it came to the point in the proceedings where I was asked by my fellow-protesters whether I’d be willing to commit an arrestable offense—one that would likely lead to a conviction and thus make travelling to the United States difficult or even impossible—I’m ashamed to say that I declined that offer. Turns out, I could not give up my relationship with New York City for the future of the planet. I’d just about managed to stop buying plastic bottles (except when very thirsty) and was trying to fly less. But never to see New York again? What pitiful ethical creatures we are (I am)! Falling at the first hurdle! Anyone who finds themselves rolling their eyes at any young person willing to put their own future into jeopardy for an ethical principle should ask themselves where the limits of their own commitments lie—also whether they’ve bought a plastic bottle or booked a flight recently. A humbling inquiry.

It is difficult to look at the recent Columbia University protests in particular without being reminded of the campus protests of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, some of which happened on the very same lawns. At that time, a cynical political class was forced to observe the spectacle of its own privileged youth standing in solidarity with the weakest historical actors of the moment, a group that included, but was not restricted to, African Americans and the Vietnamese. By placing such people within their ethical zone of interest, young Americans risked both their own academic and personal futures and—in the infamous case of Kent State—their lives. I imagine that the students at Columbia—and protesters on other campuses—fully intend this echo, and, in their unequivocal demand for both a ceasefire and financial divestment from this terrible war, to a certain extent they have achieved it.

But, when I open newspapers and see students dismissing the idea that some of their fellow-students feel, at this particular moment, unsafe on campus, or arguing that such a feeling is simply not worth attending to, given the magnitude of what is occurring in Gaza, I find such sentiments cynical and unworthy of this movement. For it may well be—within the ethical zone of interest that is a campus, which was not so long ago defined as a safe space, delineated by the boundary of a generation’s ethical ideas— it may well be that a Jewish student walking past the tents, who finds herself referred to as a Zionist, and then is warned to keep her distance, is, in that moment, the weakest participant in the zone. If the concept of safety is foundational to these students’ ethical philosophy (as I take it to be), and, if the protests are committed to reinserting ethical principles into a cynical and corrupt politics, it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands. (Those brave students who—in supporting the ethical necessity of a ceasefire—find themselves at painful odds with family, friends, faith, or community have already made this calculation.) This flexibility can also have the positive long-term political effect of allowing us to comprehend that, although our duty to the weakest is permanent, the role of “the weakest” is not an existential matter independent of time and space but, rather, a contingent situation, continually subject to change. By contrast, there is a dangerous rigidity to be found in the idea that concern for the dreadful situation of the hostages is somehow in opposition to, or incompatible with, the demand for a ceasefire. Surely a ceasefire—as well as being an ethical necessity—is also in the immediate absolute interest of the hostages, a fact that cannot be erased by tearing their posters off walls.

Part of the significance of a student protest is the ways in which it gives young people the opportunity to insist upon an ethical principle while still being, comparatively speaking, a more rational force than the supposed adults in the room, against whose crazed magical thinking they have been forced to define themselves. The equality of all human life was never a self-evident truth in racially segregated America. There was no way to “win” in Vietnam. Hamas will not be “eliminated.” The more than seven million Jewish human beings who live in the gap between the river and the sea will not simply vanish because you think that they should. All of that is just rhetoric. Words. Cathartic to chant, perhaps, but essentially meaningless. A ceasefire, meanwhile, is both a potential reality and an ethical necessity. The monstrous and brutal mass murder of more than eleven hundred people, the majority of them civilians, dozens of them children, on October 7th, has been followed by the monstrous and brutal mass murder (at the time of writing) of a reported fourteen thousand five hundred children. And many more human beings besides, but it’s impossible not to notice that the sort of people who take at face value phrases like “surgical strikes” and “controlled military operation” sometimes need to look at and/or think about dead children specifically in order to refocus their minds on reality.

To send the police in to arrest young people peacefully insisting upon a ceasefire represents a moral injury to us all. To do it with violence is a scandal. How could they do less than protest, in this moment? They are putting their own bodies into the machine. They deserve our support and praise. As to which postwar political arrangement any of these students may favor, and on what basis they favor it—that is all an argument for the day after a ceasefire. One state, two states, river to the sea—in my view, their views have no real weight in this particular moment, or very little weight next to the significance of their collective action, which (if I understand it correctly) is focussed on stopping the flow of money that is funding bloody murder, and calling for a ceasefire, the political euphemism that we use to mark the end of bloody murder. After a ceasefire, the criminal events of the past seven months should be tried and judged, and the infinitely difficult business of creating just, humane, and habitable political structures in the region must begin anew. Right now: ceasefire. And, as we make this demand, we might remind ourselves that a ceasefire is not, primarily, a political demand. Primarily, it is an ethical one.

But it is in the nature of the political that we cannot even attend to such ethical imperatives unless we first know the political position of whoever is speaking. (“Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?”) In these constructed narratives, there are always a series of shibboleths, that is, phrases that can’t be said, or, conversely, phrases that must be said. Once these words or phrases have been spoken ( river to the sea, existential threat, right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist ) and one’s positionality established, then and only then will the ethics of the question be attended to (or absolutely ignored). The objection may be raised at this point that I am behaving like a novelist, expressing a philosophy without a politics, or making some rarefied point about language and rhetoric while people commit bloody murder. This would normally be my own view, but, in the case of Israel/Palestine, language and rhetoric are and always have been weapons of mass destruction.

It is in fact perhaps the most acute example in the world of the use of words to justify bloody murder, to flatten and erase unbelievably labyrinthine histories, and to deliver the atavistic pleasure of violent simplicity to the many people who seem to believe that merely by saying something they make it so. It is no doubt a great relief to say the word “Hamas” as if it purely and solely described a terrorist entity. A great relief to say “There is no such thing as the Palestinian people” as they stand in front of you. A great relief to say “Zionist colonialist state” and accept those three words as a full and unimpeachable definition of the state of Israel, not only under the disastrous leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu but at every stage of its long and complex history, and also to hear them as a perfectly sufficient description of every man, woman, and child who has ever lived in Israel or happened to find themselves born within it. It is perhaps because we know these simplifications to be impossible that we insist upon them so passionately. They are shibboleths; they describe a people, by defining them against other people—but the people being described are ourselves. The person who says “We must eliminate Hamas” says this not necessarily because she thinks this is a possible outcome on this earth but because this sentence is the shibboleth that marks her membership in the community that says that. The person who uses the word “Zionist” as if that word were an unchanged and unchangeable monolith, meaning exactly the same thing in 2024 and 1948 as it meant in 1890 or 1901 or 1920—that person does not so much bring definitive clarity to the entangled history of Jews and Palestinians as they successfully and soothingly draw a line to mark their own zone of interest and where it ends. And while we all talk, carefully curating our shibboleths, presenting them to others and waiting for them to reveal themselves as with us or against us—while we do all that, bloody murder.

And now here we are, almost at the end of this little stream of words. We’ve arrived at the point at which I must state clearly “where I stand on the issue,” that is, which particular political settlement should, in my own, personal view, occur on the other side of a ceasefire. This is the point wherein—by my stating of a position—you are at once liberated into the simple pleasure of placing me firmly on one side or the other, putting me over there with those who lisp or those who don’t, with the Ephraimites, or with the people of Gilead. Yes, this is the point at which I stake my rhetorical flag in that fantastical, linguistical, conceptual, unreal place—built with words—where rapes are minimized as needs be, and the definition of genocide quibbled over, where the killing of babies is denied, and the precision of drones glorified, where histories are reconsidered or rewritten or analogized or simply ignored, and “Jew” and “colonialist” are synonymous, and “Palestinian” and “terrorist” are synonymous, and language is your accomplice and alibi in all of it. Language euphemized, instrumentalized, and abused, put to work for your cause and only for your cause, so that it does exactly and only what you want it to do. Let me make it easy for you. Put me wherever you want: misguided socialist, toothless humanist, naïve novelist, useful idiot, apologist, denier, ally, contrarian, collaborator, traitor, inexcusable coward. It is my view that my personal views have no more weight than an ear of corn in this particular essay. The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay is the dead. ♦

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Published: 01 May 2024

Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance exercise training

MoTrPAC Study Group ,
Lead Analysts &

MoTrPAC Study Group

Nature volume 629 , pages 174–183 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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Epigenetics
Metabolomics
Transcriptomics

Regular exercise promotes whole-body health and prevents disease, but the underlying molecular mechanisms are incompletely understood 1 , 2 , 3 . Here, the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium 4 profiled the temporal transcriptome, proteome, metabolome, lipidome, phosphoproteome, acetylproteome, ubiquitylproteome, epigenome and immunome in whole blood, plasma and 18 solid tissues in male and female Rattus norvegicus over eight weeks of endurance exercise training. The resulting data compendium encompasses 9,466 assays across 19 tissues, 25 molecular platforms and 4 training time points. Thousands of shared and tissue-specific molecular alterations were identified, with sex differences found in multiple tissues. Temporal multi-omic and multi-tissue analyses revealed expansive biological insights into the adaptive responses to endurance training, including widespread regulation of immune, metabolic, stress response and mitochondrial pathways. Many changes were relevant to human health, including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, inflammatory bowel disease, cardiovascular health and tissue injury and recovery. The data and analyses presented in this study will serve as valuable resources for understanding and exploring the multi-tissue molecular effects of endurance training and are provided in a public repository ( https://motrpac-data.org/ ).

Time trajectories in the transcriptomic response to exercise - a meta-analysis

Transcriptomic profiling of skeletal muscle adaptations to exercise and inactivity

A conserved complex lipid signature marks human muscle aging and responds to short-term exercise

Regular exercise provides wide-ranging health benefits, including reduced risks of all-cause mortality 1 , 5 , cardiometabolic and neurological diseases, cancer and other pathologies 2 , 6 , 7 . Exercise affects nearly all organ systems in either improving health or reducing disease risk 2 , 3 , 6 , 7 , with beneficial effects resulting from cellular and molecular adaptations within and across many tissues and organ systems 3 . Various ‘omic’ platforms (‘omes’) including transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics and metabolomics, have been used to study these events. However, work to date typically covers one or two omes at a single time point, is biased towards one sex, and often focuses on a single tissue, most often skeletal muscle, heart or blood 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , with few studies considering other tissues 13 . Accordingly, a comprehensive, organism-wide, multi-omic map of the effects of exercise is needed to understand the molecular underpinnings of exercise training-induced adaptations. To address this need, the Molecular Transducers of Physical Activity Consortium (MoTrPAC) was established with the goal of building a molecular map of the exercise response across a broad range of tissues in animal models and in skeletal muscle, adipose and blood in humans 4 . Here we present the first whole-organism molecular map of the temporal effects of endurance exercise training in male and female rats and provide multiple insights enabled by this MoTrPAC multi-omic data resource.

Multi-omic analysis of exercise training

Six-month-old male and female Fischer 344 rats were subjected to progressive treadmill endurance exercise training (hereafter referred to as endurance training) for 1, 2, 4 or 8 weeks, with tissues collected 48 h after the last exercise bout (Fig. 1a ). Sex-matched sedentary, untrained rats were used as controls. Training resulted in robust phenotypic changes (Extended Data Fig. 1a–d ), including increased aerobic capacity (VO 2 max) by 18% and 16% at 8 weeks in males and females, respectively (Extended Data Fig. 1a ). The percentage of body fat decreased by 5% in males at 8 weeks (Extended Data Fig. 1b ), without a significant change in lean mass (Extended Data Fig. 1c ). In females, the body fat percentage did not change after 4 or 8 weeks of training, whereas it increased by 4% in sedentary controls (Extended Data Fig. 1b ). Body weight of females increased in all intervention groups, with no change for males (Extended Data Fig. 1d ).

a , Experimental design and tissue sample processing. Inbred Fischer 344 rats were subjected to a progressive treadmill training protocol. Tissues were collected from male and female animals that remained sedentary or completed 1, 2, 4 or 8 weeks of endurance exercise training. For trained animals, samples were collected 48 h after their last exercise bout (red pins). b , Summary of molecular datasets included in this study. Up to nine data types (omes) were generated for blood, plasma, and 18 solid tissues, per animal: ACETYL: acetylproteomics; protein site acetylation; ATAC, chromatin accessibility, ATAC-seq data; IMMUNO, multiplexed immunoassays; METAB, metabolomics and lipidomics; METHYL, DNA methylation, RRBS data; PHOSPHO, phosphoproteomics; protein site phosphorylation; PROT, global proteomics; protein abundance; TRNSCRPT, transcriptomics, RNA-seq data; UBIQ, ubiquitylome, protein site ubiquitination. Tissue labels indicate the location, colour code, and abbreviation for each tissue used throughout this study: ADRNL, adrenal gland; BAT, brown adipose tissue; BLOOD, whole blood, blood RNA; COLON, colon; CORTEX, cerebral cortex; HEART, heart; HIPPOC, hippocampus; HYPOTH, hypothalamus; KIDNEY, kidney; LIVER, liver; LUNG, lung; OVARY, ovaries; PLASMA, plasma; SKM-GN, gastrocnemius (skeletal muscle); SKM-VL, vastus lateralis (skeletal muscle); SMLINT, small intestine; SPLEEN, spleen; TESTES, testes; VENACV, vena cava; WAT-SC, subcutaneous white adipose tissue. Icons next to each tissue label indicate the data types generated for that tissue. c , Number of training-regulated features at 5% FDR. Each cell represents results for a single tissue and data type. Colours indicate the proportion of measured features that are differential.

Whole blood, plasma and 18 solid tissues were analysed using genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and protein immunoassay technologies, with most assays performed in a subset of these tissues (Fig. 1b and Extended Data Fig. 1e,f ). Specific details for each omic analysis are provided in Extended Data Fig. 2 , Methods, Supplementary Discussion and Supplementary Table 1 . Molecular assays were prioritized on the basis of available tissue quantity and biological relevance, with the gastrocnemius, heart, liver and white adipose tissue having the most diverse set of molecular assays performed, followed by the kidney, lung, brown adipose tissue and hippocampus (Extended Data Fig. 1e ). Altogether, datasets were generated from 9,466 assays across 211 combinations of tissues and molecular platforms, resulting in 681,256 non-epigenetic and 14,334,496 epigenetic (reduced-representation bisulfite sequencing (RRBS) and assay for transposase-accessible chromatin using sequencing (ATAC-seq)) measurements, corresponding to 213,689 and 2,799,307 unique non-epigenetic and epigenetic features, respectively.

Differential analysis was used to characterize the molecular responses to endurance training (Methods). We computed the overall significance of the training response for each feature, denoted as the training P value, where 35,439 features at 5% false discovery rate (FDR) comprise the training-regulated differential features (Fig. 1c and Supplementary Table 2 ). Timewise summary statistics quantify the exercise training effects for each sex and time point. Training-regulated molecules were observed in the vast majority of tissues for all omes, including a relatively large proportion of transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics and immunoassay features (Fig. 1c ). The observed timewise effects were modest: 56% of the per-feature maximum fold changes were between 0.67 and 1.5. Permutation testing showed that permuting the group or sex labels resulted in a significant reduction in the number of selected analytes in most tissues (Extended Data Fig. 3a–d and Supplementary Discussion ). For transcriptomics, the hypothalamus, cortex, testes and vena cava had the smallest proportion of training-regulated genes, whereas the blood, brown and white adipose tissues, adrenal gland and colon showed more extensive effects (Fig. 1c ). For proteomics, the gastrocnemius, heart and liver showed substantial differential regulation in both protein abundance and post-translational modifications (PTMs), with more restricted results in white adipose tissue, lung and kidney protein abundance. For metabolomics, a large proportion of differential metabolites were consistently observed across all tissues, although the absolute numbers were related to the number of metabolomic platforms used (Extended Data Fig. 1e ). The vast number of differential features over the training time course across tissues and omes highlights the multi-faceted, organism-wide nature of molecular adaptations to endurance training.

Multi-tissue response to training

To identify tissue-specific and multi-tissue training-responsive gene expression, we considered the six tissues with the deepest molecular profiling: gastrocnemius, heart, liver, white adipose tissue, lung and kidney. In sum, 11,407 differential features from these datasets were mapped to their cognate gene, for a total of 7,115 unique genes across the tissues (Fig. 2a , Extended Data Fig. 4a and Supplementary Table 3 ). Most of the genes with at least one training-responsive feature were tissue-specific (67%), with the greatest number appearing in white adipose tissue (Fig. 2a ). We identified pathways enriched by these tissue-specific training-responsive genes (Extended Data Fig. 4b ) and tabulated a subset of highly specific genes to gain insight into tissue-specific training adaptation (Supplementary Table 4 ). Focusing on sexually conserved responses revealed tissue-dependent adaptations. These included changes related to immune cell recruitment and tissue remodelling in the lung, cofactor and cholesterol biosynthesis in the liver, ion flux in the heart, and metabolic processes and striated muscle contraction in the gastrocnemius ( Supplementary Discussion ). A detailed analysis of white adipose tissue adaptations to exercise training is provided elsewhere 14 . We also observed ‘ome’-specific responses, with unique transcript and protein responses at the gene and pathway levels (Extended Data Fig. 4c,d , Supplementary Discussion and Supplementary Tables 5 and 6 ).

a , UpSet plot of the training-regulated gene sets associated with each tissue. Bars and dots indicating tissue-specific differential genes are coloured by tissue. Pathway enrichment analysis is shown for selected sets of genes in b , c as indicated by the arrows. b , c , Significantly enriched pathways (10% FDR) corresponding to genes that are differential in both LUNG and WAT-SC datasets ( b ) and the 22 genes that are training-regulated in all six tissues considered in a ( c ). Redundant pathways (those with an overlap of 80% or greater with an existing pathway) were removed. ESR, oestrogen receptor; T H 17, T helper 17.

2,359 genes had differential features in at least two tissues (Fig. 2a ). Lung and white adipose tissue had the largest set of uniquely shared genes ( n = 249), with predominantly immune-related pathway enrichments (Fig. 2b ); expression patterns suggested decreased inflammation in the lung and increased immune cell recruitment in white adipose tissue (Supplementary Tables 2 and 3 ). Heart and gastrocnemius had the second-largest group of uniquely shared genes, with enrichment of mitochondrial metabolism pathways including the mitochondria fusion genes Opa1 and Mfn1 (Supplementary Table 3 ).

Twenty-two genes were training-regulated in all six tissues, with particular enrichment in heat shock response pathways (Fig. 2c ). Exercise induces the expression of heat shock proteins (HSPs) in various rodent and human tissues 15 . A focused analysis of our transcriptomics and proteomics data revealed HSPs as prominent outliers (Extended Data Fig. 5a and Supplementary Discussion ). Specifically, there was a marked, proteomics-driven up-regulation in the abundance of HSPs, including the major HSPs HSPA1B and HSP90AA1 (Extended Data Fig. 5b,c ). Another ubiquitous endurance training response involved regulation of the kininogenases KNG1 and KNG2 (Supplementary Table 3 ). These enzymes are part of the kallikrein–kininogen system and have been implicated in the hypotensive and insulin-sensitizing effects of exercise 16 , 17 .

Transcription factors and phosphosignalling

We used proteomics and transcriptomics data to infer changes in transcription factor and phosphosignalling activities in response to endurance training through transcription factor and PTM enrichment analyses (Methods). We compared the most significantly enriched transcription factors across tissues (Fig. 3a , Extended Data Fig. 6a and Supplementary Table 7 ). In the blood, we observed enrichment of the haematopoietic-associated transcription factors GABPA, ETS1, KLF3 and ZNF143; haematopoietic progenitors are proposed to be transducers of the health benefits of exercise 18 . In the heart and skeletal muscle, we observed a cluster of enriched Mef2 family transcription factor motifs (Fig. 3a ). MEF2C is a muscle-associated transcription factor involved in skeletal, cardiac and smooth muscle cell differentiation and has been implicated in vascular development, formation of the cardiac loop and neuron differentiation 19 .

a , Transcription factor motif enrichment analysis of the training-regulated transcripts in each tissue. The heat map shows enrichment z -scores across the differential genes for the 13 tissues that had at least 300 genes after mapping transcript IDs to gene symbols. Transcription factors were hierarchically clustered by their enrichment across tissues. CRE, cAMP response element. b , Estimate of activity changes in selected kinases and signalling pathways using PTM signature enrichment analysis on phosphoproteomics data. Only kinases or pathways with a significant difference in at least one tissue, sex or time point ( q value < 0.05) are shown. The heat map shows normalized enrichment score (NES) as colour; tissue, sex and time point combinations as columns, and either kinases or pathways as rows. Kinases are grouped by family; rows are hierarchically clustered within each group. FSH, follicle-stimulating hormone; TSH, thyroid-stimulating hormone.

Phosphorylation signatures of key kinases were altered across many tissues (Fig. 3b and Supplementary Table 8 ). This included AKT1 across heart, kidney and lung, mTOR across heart, kidney and white adipose tissue, and MAPK across heart and kidney. The liver showed an increase in the phosphosignature related to regulators of hepatic regeneration, including EGFR1, IGF and HGF (Extended Data Fig. 6b , Supplementary Discussion ). Increased phosphorylation of STAT3 and PXN, HGF targets involved in cell proliferation, suggest a mechanism for liver regeneration in response to exercise (Extended Data Fig. 6c ). In the heart, kinases showed bidirectional changes in their predicted basal activity in response to endurance training (Extended Data Fig. 6d and Supplementary Discussion ). Several AGC protein kinases showed a decrease in predicted activity, including AKT1, whereas tyrosine kinases, including SRC and mTOR, were predicted to have increased activity. The known SRC target phosphorylation sites GJA1 pY265 and CDH2 pY820 showed significantly increased phosphorylation in response to training (Extended Data Fig. 6e ). Notably, phosphorylation of GJA1 Y265 has previously been shown to disrupt gap junctions, key transducers of cardiac electrical conductivity 20 . This suggests that SRC signalling may regulate extracellular structural remodelling of the heart to promote physiologically beneficial adaptations. In agreement with this hypothesis, gene set enrichment analysis (GSEA) of extracellular matrix proteins revealed a negative enrichment in response to endurance training, showing decreased abundance of proteins such as basement membrane proteins (Extended Data Fig. 6f–h and Supplementary Table 9 ).

Molecular hubs of exercise adaptation

To compare the dynamic multi-omic responses to endurance training across tissues, we clustered the 34,244 differential features with complete timewise summary statistics using an empirical Bayes graphical clustering approach (Methods). By integrating these results onto a graph, we summarize the dynamics of the molecular training response and identify groups of features with similar responses (Extended Data Fig. 7 and Supplementary Table 10 ). We performed pathway enrichment analysis for many graphically defined clusters to characterize putative underlying biology (Supplementary Table 11 ).

We examined biological processes associated with training using the pathway enrichment results for up-regulated features at 8 weeks of training (Extended Data Fig. 8 , Supplementary Table 12 and Supplementary Discussion ). Compared with other tissues, the liver showed substantial regulation of chromatin accessibility, including in the nuclear receptor signalling and cellular senescence pathways. In the gastrocnemius, terms related to peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPAR) signalling and lipid synthesis and degradation were enriched at the protein level, driven by proteins including the lipid droplet features PLIN2, PLIN4 and PLIN5. At the metabolomic level, terms related to ether lipid and glycerophospholipid metabolism were enriched. Together, these enrichments highlight the well-known ability of endurance training to modulate skeletal muscle lipid composition, storage, synthesis and metabolism. The blood displayed pathway enrichments related to translation and organelle biogenesis and maintenance. Paired with the transcription factor analysis (Fig. 3a ), this suggests increased haematopoietic cellular mobilization in the blood. Less studied tissues in the context of exercise training, including the adrenal gland, spleen, cortex, hippocampus and colon, also showed regulation of diverse pathways ( Supplementary Discussion ).

To identify the main temporal or sex-associated responses in each tissue, we summarized the graphical cluster sizes by tissue and time (Extended Data Fig. 7a ). We observed that the small intestine and plasma had more changes at weeks 1 and 2 of training. Conversely, many up-regulated features in brown adipose tissue and down-regulated features in white adipose tissue were observed only at week 8. The largest proportion of opposite effects between males and females was observed at week 1 in the adrenal gland. Other tissues, including the blood, heart, lung, kidney and skeletal muscle (gastrocnemius and vastus lateralis), had relatively consistent numbers of up-regulated and down-regulated features.

We next focused on characterizing shared molecular responses in the three striated muscles (gastrocnemius, vastus lateralis and heart). The three largest graphical clustering paths of differential features in each muscle tissue converged to a sex-consistent response by week 8 (Fig. 4a ). Because of the large number of muscle features that were up-regulated in both sexes at week 8, we further examined the corresponding multi-omic set of analytes (Fig. 4b ). Pathway enrichment analysis of the genes associated with these differential features demonstrated a sex- and muscle-consistent endurance training response that reflected up-regulation of mitochondrial metabolism, biogenesis and translation, and cellular response to heat stress (Fig. 4c and Supplementary Table 11 ).

a , Graphical representation of training-differential features in the three muscle tissues: gastrocnemius (SKM-GN), vastus lateralis (SKM-VL) and heart. Each node represents one of nine possible states (rows) at each of the four training time points (columns). Triangles to the left of row labels map states to symbols used in Fig. 5a . Edges represent the path of differential features over the training time course (see Extended Data Fig. 7 for a detailed explanation). Each graph includes the three largest paths of differential features in that tissue, with edges split by data type. Both node and edge size are proportional to the number of features represented. The node corresponding to features that are up-regulated in both sexes at 8 weeks of training (8w_F1_M1) is circled in each graph. b , Line plots of standardized abundances of all 8w_F1_M1 muscle features. The black line represents the average value across all features. c , Network view of significant pathway enrichment results (10% FDR) corresponding to the features in b . Nodes represent pathways; edges represent functionally similar node pairs (set similarity ≥ 0.3). Nodes are included only if they are significantly enriched in at least two of the muscle tissues, as indicated by node colour. Node size is proportional to the number of differential feature sets (for example, gastrocnemius transcripts) for which the pathway is significantly enriched. High-level biological themes were defined using Louvain community detection of the nodes. d , A subnetwork of a larger cluster identified by network clustering 8w_F1_M1 features from SKM-GN. Mech., mechanical.

We used a network connectivity analysis to study up-regulated features in the gastrocnemius at week 8 (Extended Data Fig. 9a,b , Methods and Supplementary Discussion ). Mapping features to genes revealed overlaps between transcriptomic, chromatin accessibility, and proteomic assays, but no overlaps with methylation. Three molecular interaction networks were compared (Methods), and BioGRID 21 was used for further clustering analysis, which identified three clusters (Extended Data Fig. 9c and Supplementary Table 13 ). The largest cluster was significantly enriched for multiple muscle adaptation processes (Fig. 4d and Supplementary Table 14 ). This analysis illustrates the direct linkage among pathways and putative central regulators, emphasizing the importance of multi-omic data in identifying interconnected networks and understanding skeletal muscle remodelling.

Connection to human diseases and traits

To systematically evaluate the translational value of our data, we integrated our results with extant exercise studies and disease ontology (DO) annotations (Methods). First, we compared our vastus lateralis transcriptomics results to a meta-analysis of long-term training gene-expression changes in human skeletal muscle tissue 8 , demonstrating a significant and direction-consistent overlap (Extended Data Fig. 9d–g and Supplementary Discussion ). We also identified a significant overlap between differential transcripts in the gastrocnemius of female rats trained for 8 weeks and differentially expressed genes identified in the soleus in a study of sedentary and exercise-trained female rats selectively bred for high or low exercise capacity 22 (Extended Data Fig. 9h ). Similarly, adaptations from high-intensity interval training in humans 23 significantly overlapped with the proteomics response in rats (Extended Data Fig. 9i ), particularly for female rats trained for 8 weeks (Extended Data Fig. 9j ). Finally, we performed DO enrichment analysis using the DOSE R package 24 (Supplementary Table 15 and Methods). Down-regulated genes from white adipose tissue, kidney and liver were enriched for several disease terms, suggesting a link between the exercise response and type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, obesity and kidney disease (5% FDR; Extended Data Fig. 9k and Supplementary Discussion ), which are all epidemiologically related co-occurring diseases 25 . Overall, these results support a high concordance of our data from rats with human studies and their relevance to human disease.

Sex-specific responses to exercise

Many tissues showed sex differences in their training responses (Extended Data Fig. 10 ), with 58% of the 8-week training-regulated features demonstrating sex-differentiated responses. Opposite responses between the sexes were observed in adrenal gland transcripts, lung phosphosites and chromatin accessibility features, white adipose tissue transcripts and liver acetylsites. In addition, proinflammatory cytokines exhibited sex-associated changes across tissues (Extended Data Fig. 11a,b and Supplementary Table 16 ). Most female-specific cytokines were differentially regulated between weeks 1 and 2 of training, whereas most male-specific cytokines were differentially regulated between weeks 4 and 8 (Extended Data Fig. 11c ).

We observed extensive transcriptional remodelling of the adrenal gland, with more than 4,000 differential genes. Notably, the largest graphical path of training-regulated features was negatively correlated between males and females, with sustained down-regulation in females and transient up-regulation at 1 week in males (Extended Data Fig. 11d ). The genes in this path were also associated with steroid hormone synthesis pathways and metabolism, particularly those pertaining to mitochondrial function (Supplementary Table 11 ). Further, transcription factor motif enrichment analysis of the transcripts in this path showed enrichment of 14 transcription factors (5% FDR; Supplementary Table 17 ), including the metabolism-regulating factors PPARγ, PPARα and oestrogen-related receptor gamma (ERRγ). The gene-expression levels of several significantly enriched transcription factors themselves followed the same trajectory as this path (Extended Data Fig. 11e ).

In the rat lung, we observed decreased phosphosignalling activity with training primarily in males (Fig. 3b ). Among these, the PRKACA phosphorylation signature showed the largest sex difference at 1 and 2 weeks (Extended Data Fig. 11f–h and Supplementary Table 8 ). PRKACA is a kinase that is involved in signalling within multiple cellular pathways. However, four PRKACA substrates followed this pattern and were associated with cellular structures (such as cytoskeleton and cell–cell junctions): DSP, MYLK, STMN1 and SYNE1 (Extended Data Fig. 11i ). The phosphorylation of these proteins suggests a sex-dependent role of PRKACA in mediating changes in lung structure or mechanical function with training. This is supported as DSP and MYLK have essential roles in alveolar and epithelial cell remodelling in the lung 26 , 27 .

Immune pathway enrichment analysis of training-regulated transcripts at 8 weeks showed limited enrichment in muscle (heart, gastrocnemius and vastus lateralis) and brain (cortex, hippocampus, hypothalamus), down-regulation in the lung and small intestine, and strong up-regulation in brown and white adipose tissue in males only (Fig. 5a , Extended Data Fig. 12a and Supplementary Table 11 ). Many of the same immune pathways (Supplementary Table 18 ) and immune-related transcription factors (Supplementary Table 19 ) were enriched in both adipose tissues in males. Furthermore, correlation between the transcript expression profiles of male-specific up-regulated features in the adipose tissues and immune cell markers from external cell-typing assays revealed a strong positive correlation for many immune cell types, including B, T and natural killer cells, and low correlation with platelets, erythrocytes and lymphatic tissue (Fig. 5b,c , Methods and Supplementary Table 20 ). These patterns suggest recruitment of peripheral immune cells or proliferation of tissue-resident immune cells as opposed to non-biological variation in blood or lymph content. Correlations at the protein level were not as marked (Extended Data Fig. 12b,c ). Complementary analyses using CIBERTSORTx produced similar results (Extended Data Fig. 12d,e ). In summary, our data suggest an important role of immune cell activity in the adaptation of male adipose tissue to endurance training.

a , Enrichment analysis results of the training-differential transcripts at 8 weeks in Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) immune system pathways (10% FDR). NK, natural killer. b , Line plots of standardized abundances of selected training-differential transcripts. Brown and white adipose tissue show male-specific up-regulation at week 8 (8w_F0_M1). The small intestine (SMLINT) shows down-regulation in females and partial down-regulation in males at week 8 (8w_F-1_M0 or 8w_F-1_M-1). c , Box plots of the sample-level Pearson correlation between markers of immune cell types, lymphatic tissue or cell proliferation and the average value of features in b at the transcript level. A pink dot indicates that the marker is also one of the differential features plotted in b . A pound sign indicates that the distribution of Pearson correlations for a set of at least two markers is significantly different from 0 (two-sided one-sample t -test, 5% FDR). When only one marker is used to define a category on the y axis, the gene name is provided in parentheses. In box plots, the centre line represents median, box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles, whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers and blue dots represent outliers.

The small intestine was among the tissues with the highest enrichment in immune-related pathways (Extended Data Fig. 12a ), with down-regulation of transcripts at 8 weeks, and a more robust response in females (Fig. 5b ). This transcript set was significantly enriched with pathways related to gut inflammation (Supplementary Table 11 ). We observed positive associations between these transcripts and markers of several immune cell types, including B, T, natural killer and dendritic cells, suggesting decreased abundance (Fig. 5c and Supplementary Discussion ). Endurance training also decreased the expression of transcripts with genetic risk loci for inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), including major histocompatability complex class II 28 , a finding that also emerged through the DO enrichment analysis (Supplementary Table 15 ). Endurance training is suggested to reduce systemic inflammation, in part by increasing gut microbial diversity and gut barrier integrity 29 . In accordance, we observed decreases in Cxcr3 and Il1a with training (Extended Data Fig. 12f ), both of which are implicated in the pathogenesis of IBD 30 , 31 . Together, these data suggest that endurance training improves gut homeostasis, potentially conferring systemic anti-inflammatory effects.

Multi-tissue changes in mitochondria and lipids

We summarized the organism-wide metabolic changes for metabolomic datasets using RefMet metabolite classes (Fig. 6a and Supplementary Table 21 ) and for non-metabolomics datasets using metabolic subcategories of KEGG pathways (10% FDR; Extended Data Fig. 13a and Supplementary Table 11 ). The liver showed the greatest number of significantly enriched metabolite classes, followed by the heart, lung and hippocampus (Fig. 6a and Supplementary Discussion ). Inspection of individual metabolites and acylcarnitine groups revealed changes associated with functional alterations in response to training (Extended Data Fig. 13b–d and Supplementary Discussion ). Of particular interest, trimethylamine- N -oxide has been associated with cardiovascular disease 32 . We observed up-regulation of 1-methylhistidine, a marker of muscle protein turnover, in the kidney at 1, 2 and 4 weeks, which may indicate muscle breakdown and clearance through the kidney during early training time points. Cortisol levels were increased as expected from the physiological stress of training, and we observed a substantial increase in the kidney, again probably owing to renal clearance 33 . The liver showed up-regulation of 1-methylnicotinamide, which may have a role in inflammation 34 , at 8 weeks.

a , RefMet metabolite class enrichment calculated using GSEA with the −log 10 training P value. Significant chemical class enrichments (5% FDR) are shown as black circles with size is proportional to FDR. Small grey circles are chemical class enrichments that were not significant, and blank cells were not tested owing to low numbers of detected metabolites. TCA, tricarboxylic acid cycle. b , GSEA results using the MitoCarta MitoPathways gene set database and proteomics (PROT) or acetylome (ACETYL) timewise summary statistics for training. NESs are shown for significant pathways (10% FDR). Mitochondrial pathways shown as rows are grouped using the parental group in the MitoPathways hierarchy. OXPHOS, oxidative phosphorylation. c , Line plots of standardized abundances of liver training-differential features across all data types that are up-regulated in both sexes, with a later response in females (LIVER: 1w_F0_M1 − >2w_F0_M1 − >4w_F0_M1 − >8w_F1_M1). The black line represents the average value across all features. d , Network view of pathway enrichment results corresponding to features in c . Nodes indicate significantly enriched pathways (10% FDR); edges connect nodes if there is a similarity score of at least 0.375 between the gene sets driving each pathway enrichment. Node colours indicate omes in which the enrichment was observed. e , log 2 fold changes (logFC) relative to sedentary controls for metabolites within the ‘Lipids and lipid related compounds’ category in the 8-week liver. Heat map colour represents fold change (red, positive; blue, negative). Compounds are grouped into columns based on category (coloured bars).

The heart showed enrichment of various carbohydrate metabolism subcategories across many omes (Extended Data Fig. 13a ), and remarkably, all enzymes within the glycolysis–gluconeogenesis pathway showed a consistent increase in abundance, except for GPI, FBP2 and DLAT (Extended Data Fig. 13e ). Oxidative phosphorylation was enriched in most tissues and is consistent with the joint analyses of the muscle tissues (Fig. 4c ), suggesting potential changes in mitochondria biogenesis. We estimated proportional mitochondrial changes to endurance training using mitochondrial RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq) reads (Extended Data Fig. 14a–c ) and changes of mitochondrial functions through GSEA using gene expression, protein abundance and protein PTMs (Fig. 6b , Extended Data Fig. 14d and Supplementary Tables 22 – 25 ). Increased mitochondrial biogenesis was observed in skeletal muscle, heart and liver across these analyses. Moreover, sex-specific mitochondrial changes were observed in the adrenal gland, as described above, and in the colon, lung and kidney. These results highlight a highly adaptive and pervasive mitochondrial response to endurance training; a more in-depth analysis of this response is provided elsewhere 35 .

In the liver, we observed substantial regulation of metabolic pathways across the proteome, acetylome and lipidome (Fig. 6a,b and Extended Data Fig. 13a ). For example, there was significant enrichment in 12 metabolite classes belonging to ‘lipids and lipid-related compounds’ (Fig. 6a and Supplementary Table 26 ). We therefore focused on the large group of features that increased in abundance over time for both sexes (Fig. 6c ). Most of these liver features corresponded to protein abundance and protein acetylation changes in the mitochondrial, amino acid and lipid metabolic pathways (Fig. 6d and Supplementary Table 27 ). We also observed an increase in phosphatidylcholines and a concomitant decrease in triacylglycerols (Fig. 6e ). Finally, there was increased abundance and acetylation of proteins from the peroxisome, an organelle with key functions in lipid metabolism (Extended Data Fig. 14e ). To our knowledge, these extensive changes in protein acetylation in response to endurance training have not been described previously. Together, these molecular adaptations may constitute part of the mechanisms underlying exercise-mediated improvements in liver health, particularly protection against excessive intrahepatic lipid storage and steatosis 36 .

Mapping the molecular exercise responses across a whole organism is critical for understanding the beneficial effects of exercise. Previous studies are limited to a few tissues, a narrow temporal range, or a single sex. Substantially expanding on the current work in the field, we used 25 distinct molecular platforms in as many as 19 tissues to study the temporal changes to endurance exercise training in male and female rats. Accordingly, we identified thousands of training-induced changes within and across tissues, including temporal and sex-biased responses, in mRNA transcripts, proteins, post-translational modifications and metabolites. Each omic dataset provides unique insights into exercise adaptation, where a holistic understanding requires multi-omic analysis. This work illustrates how mining our data resource can both recapitulate expected mechanisms and provide novel biological insights.

This work can be leveraged to deepen our understanding of exercise-related improvement of health and disease management. The global heat shock response to exercise may confer cytoprotective effects, including in pathologies related to tissue damage and injury recovery 37 . Increased acetylation of liver mitochondrial enzymes and regulation of lipid metabolism may link exercise to protection against non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and steatohepatitis 36 . Similarly, exercise-mediated modulation of cytokines, receptors and transcripts linked to intestinal inflammation or IBD may be associated with improved gut health. These examples highlight unique training responses illuminated by a multi-omics approach that can be leveraged for future hypothesis-driven research on how exercise improves whole-body and tissue-specific health.

We note limitations in our experimental design, datasets and analyses ( Supplementary Discussion ). In short, samples were collected 48 h after the last exercise bout to capture sustained alterations, thereby excluding acute responses. Our assays were performed on bulk tissue and do not cover single-cell platforms. Our resource has limited omic characterization for certain tissues, and additional platforms with emerging biological relevance were not utilized, including microbiome profiling. Moreover, our results are hypothesis-generating and require biological validation; supporting this, we have established a publicly accessible tissue bank from this study.

This MoTrPAC resource provides future opportunities to enhance and refine the molecular map of the endurance training response. We expect that this dataset will remain an ongoing platform to translate tissue- and sex-specific molecular changes in rats to humans. MoTrPAC has made extensive efforts to facilitate access, exploration and interpretation of this resource. We developed the MoTrPAC Data Hub to easily explore and download data ( https://motrpac-data.org/ ), software packages to provide reproducible source code and facilitate data retrieval and analysis in R (MotrpacRatTraining6mo and MotrpacRatTraining6moData 38 , 39 ), and visualization tools for data exploration ( https://data-viz.motrpac-data.org ). Altogether, this multi-omic resource serves as a broadly useful reference for studying the milieu of molecular changes in endurance training adaptation and provides new opportunities to understand the effects of exercise on health and disease.

All methods are included in the Supplementary Information .

Reporting summary

Further information on research design is available in the Nature Portfolio Reporting Summary linked to this article.

Data availability

MoTrPAC data are publicly available via http://motrpac-data.org/data-access . Data access inquiries should be sent to [email protected]. Additional resources can be found at http://motrpac.org and https://motrpac-data.org/ . Interactive data visualizations are provided through a website ( https://data-viz.motrpac-data.org ) and HTML reports summarizing the multi-omic graphical analysis results in each tissue 40 . Processed data and analysis results are additionally available in the MotrpacRatTraining6moData R package 39 ( https://github.com/MoTrPAC/MotrpacRatTraining6moData ). Raw and processed data for were deposited in the appropriate public repositories as follows. RNA-seq, ATAC-seq and RRBS data were deposited at the Sequence Read Archive under accession PRJNA908279 and at the Gene Expression Omnibus under accession GSE242358 ; multiplexed immunoassays were deposited at IMMPORT under accession SDY2193 ; metabolomics data were deposited at Metabolomics Workbench under project ID PR001020 ; and proteomics data were deposited at MassIVE under accessions MSV000092911 , MSV000092922 , MSV000092923 , MSV000092924 , MSV000092925 and MSV000092931 . We used the following external datasets: release 96 of the Ensembl R. norvegicus (rn6) genome ( https://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-96/fasta/rattus_norvegicus/dna/ ) and gene annotation ( https://ftp.ensembl.org/pub/release-96/gtf/rattus_norvegicus/Rattus_norvegicus.Rnor_6.0.96.gtf.gz ); RefSeq protein database ( https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/refseq/R_norvegicus/ , downloaded 11/2018); the NCBI gene2refseq mapping files ( https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/gene/DATA/gene2refseq.gz , accessed 18 December 2020); RGD rat gene annotation ( https://download.rgd.mcw.edu/data_release/RAT/GENES_RAT.txt , accessed 12 November 2021); BioGRID v4.2.193 ( https://downloads.thebiogrid.org/File/BioGRID/Release-Archive/BIOGRID-4.2.193/BIOGRID-ORGANISM-4.2.193.tab3.zip ); STRING v11.5 ( https://stringdb-downloads.org/download/protein.physical.links.v11.5/10116.protein.physical.links.v11.5.txt.gz ); GENCODE release 39 metadata and annotation files ( https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/gencode/Gencode_human/release_39/ , accessed 20 January 2022); MatrisomeDB ( https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac1009 ); MitoPathways database available through MitoCarta ( https://personal.broadinstitute.org/scalvo/MitoCarta3.0/ ); PTMSigDB v1.9.0 PTM set database ( https://doi.org/10.1074/mcp.TIR118.000943 ); UniProt human proteome FASTA for canonical protein sequences (UniProtKB query “reviewed:true AND proteome:up000005640”, download date 3 March 2021); the CIBERSORT LM22 leukocyte gene signature matrix ( https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-7493-1_12 ); published results from Amar et al. 8 , Bye et al. 22 and Hostrup et al. 23 ; and GTEx v8 gene-expression data (dbGaP Accession phs000424.v8.p2). Details are provided in the Supplementary Information , Methods.

Code availability

Code for reproducing the main analyses is provided in the MotrpacRatTraining6mo R package 38 ( https://motrpac.github.io/MotrpacRatTraining6mo/ ). MoTrPAC data processing pipelines for RNA-seq, ATAC-seq, RRBS and proteomics are available in the following Github repositories: https://github.com/MoTrPAC/motrpac-rna-seq-pipeline 41 , https://github.com/MoTrPAC/motrpac-atac-seq-pipeline 42 , https://github.com/MoTrPAC/motrpac-rrbs-pipeline 43 and https://github.com/MoTrPAC/motrpac-proteomics-pipeline 44 . Normalization and quality control scripts are available at https://github.com/MoTrPAC/MotrpacRatTraining6moQCRep 45 .

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Acknowledgements

Funding: The MoTrPAC Study is supported by NIH grants U24OD026629 (Bioinformatics Center), U24DK112349, U24DK112342, U24DK112340, U24DK112341, U24DK112326, U24DK112331, U24DK112348 (Chemical Analysis Sites), U01AR071133, U01AR071130, U01AR071124, U01AR071128, U01AR071150, U01AR071160, U01AR071158 (Clinical Centers), U24AR071113 (Consortium Coordinating Center), U01AG055133, U01AG055137 and U01AG055135 (PASS/Animal Sites). This work was also supported by other funding sources: NHGRI Institutional Training Grant in Genome Science 5T32HG000044 (N.R.G.), National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Grant No. NSF 1445197 (N.R.G.), National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institute of Health F32 postdoctoral fellowship award F32HL154711 (P.M.J.B.), the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (M.E.L.), National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) CHE-1726528 (F.M.F.), National Institute on Aging P30AG044271 and P30AG003319 (N.M.), and NORC at the University of Chicago grant no. P30DK07247 (E.R.). Parts of this work were performed in the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national scientific user facility at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, WA. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the NIH or the US Department of Health and Human Services. Some figures were created using Biorender.com. Fig. 1b was modified with permission from ref. 46 .

Author information

These authors contributed equally: David Amar, Nicole R. Gay, Pierre M. Jean-Beltran

These authors jointly supervised this work: Sue C. Bodine, Steven A. Carr, Karyn A. Esser, Stephen B. Montgomery, Simon Schenk, Michael P. Snyder, Matthew T. Wheeler

Authors and Affiliations

Department of Medicine, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

David Amar, David Jimenez-Morales, Malene E. Lindholm, Shruti Marwaha, Archana Natarajan Raja, Jimmy Zhen, Euan Ashley, Matthew T. Wheeler, Karen P. Dalton, Steven G. Hershman, Mihir Samdarshi & Christopher Teng

Department of Genetics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Nicole R. Gay, Bingqing Zhao, Jose J. Almagro Armenteros, Nasim Bararpour, Si Wu, Stephen B. Montgomery, Michael P. Snyder, Clarisa Chavez, Roxanne Chiu, Krista M. Hennig, Chia-Jui Hung, Christopher A. Jin & Navid Zebarjadi

Proteomics Platform, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

Pierre M. Jean-Beltran, Hasmik Keshishian, Natalie M. Clark, Steven A. Carr, D. R. Mani, Charles C. Mundorff & Cadence Pearce

Department of Internal Medicine, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA

Dam Bae, Ana C. Lira, Sue C. Bodine, Michael Cicha, Luis Gustavo Oliveira De Sousa, Bailey E. Jackson, Kyle S. Kramer, Andrea G. Marshall & Collyn Z-T. Richards

Department of Quantitative Health Sciences, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Surendra Dasari

Metabolomics Platform, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USA

Courtney Dennis, Julian Avila-Pacheco & Clary B. Clish

Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Charles R. Evans & Charles F. Burant

School of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

David A. Gaul, Evan M. Savage & Facundo M. Fernández

Department of Medicine, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Olga Ilkayeva, William E. Kraus & Kim M. Huffman

Duke Molecular Physiology Institute, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

Olga Ilkayeva, Michael J. Muehlbauer, William E. Kraus, Christopher Newgard, Kim M. Huffman & Megan E. Ramaker

Emory Integrated Metabolomics and Lipidomics Core, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Anna A. Ivanova, Xueyun Liu & Kristal M. Maner-Smith

BRCF Metabolomics Core, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Maureen T. Kachman, Alexander (Sasha) Raskind & Tanu Soni

Division of Endocrinology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

Ian R. Lanza

Department of Neurology, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

Venugopalan D. Nair, Gregory R. Smith, Yongchao Ge, Stuart C. Sealfon, Mary Anne S. Amper, Kristy Guevara, Nada Marjanovic, German Nudelman, Hanna Pincas, Irene Ramos, Stas Rirak, Aliza B. Rubenstein, Frederique Ruf-Zamojski, Nitish Seenarine, Sindhu Vangeti, Mital Vasoya, Alexandria Vornholt, Xuechen Yu & Elena Zaslavsky

Environmental Molecular Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

Paul D. Piehowski

Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA

Jessica L. Rooney, Russell Tracy, Elaine Cornell, Nicole Gagne & Sandy May

Department of Pathology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Kevin S. Smith, Nikolai G. Vetr, Stephen B. Montgomery & Daniel Nachun

Department of Biostatistics and Data Science, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Cynthia L. Stowe, Fang-Chi Hsu, Scott Rushing & Michael P. Walkup

Biological Sciences Division, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Richland, WA, USA

Gina M. Many, James A. Sanford, Joshua N. Adkins, Wei-Jun Qian, Marina A. Gritsenko, Joshua R. Hansen, Chelsea Hutchinson-Bunch, Matthew E. Monroe, Ronald J. Moore, Michael D. Nestor, Vladislav A. Petyuk & Tyler J. Sagendorf

Department of Biochemistry, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Tiantian Zhang, Zhenxin Hou & Eric A. Ortlund

Section on Integrative Physiology and Metabolism, Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, MA, USA

David M. Presby, Laurie J. Goodyear, Brent G. Albertson, Tiziana Caputo, Michael F. Hirshman, Nathan S. Makarewicz, Pasquale Nigro & Krithika Ramachandran

Department of Human Genetics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

Alec Steep & Jun Z. Li

Department of Pharmacological Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

Yifei Sun & Martin J. Walsh

Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, NY, USA

Aging and Metabolism Research Program, Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, Oklahoma City, OK, USA

Sue C. Bodine

Department of Physiology and Aging, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Karyn A. Esser & Marco Pahor

Department of Orthopaedic Surgery, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA

Simon Schenk

Department of Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Stephen B. Montgomery

Department of Biostatistics, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

Gary Cutter

Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA, USA

Robert E. Gerszten & Jeremy M. Robbins

Division of Public Health Sciences, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Michael E. Miller

Department of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, MN, USA

K. Sreekumaran Nair

Department of Statistics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Trevor Hastie & Rob Tibshirani

Department of Biomedical Data Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

Rob Tibshirani

Department of Aging and Geriatric Research, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Brian Bouverat, Christiaan Leeuwenburgh & Ching-ju Lu

Section on Gerontology and Geriatric Medicine, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

Barbara Nicklas

Department of Health and Exercise Science, Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC, USA

W. Jack Rejeski

National Institute on Aging, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

John P. Williams

National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA

Applied Physiology and Kinesiology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

Elisabeth R. Barton

Department of Biomedical Sciences, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Frank W. Booth

Department of Medical Pharmacology and Physiology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Department of Nutrition and Exercise Physiology, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Frank W. Booth & R. Scott Rector

Dalton Cardiovascular Research Center, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Department of Kinesiology and Health Education, University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

Roger Farrar

Department of Medicine, Division of Endocrinology and Diabetes, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Andrea L. Hevener

Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Benjamin G. Ke & Chongzhi Zang

Section on Clinical, Behavioral, and Outcomes Research, Joslin Diabetes Center, Boston, MA, USA

Sarah J. Lessard

Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Andrea G. Marshall

Department of Health Sciences, Stetson University, Deland, FL, USA

Scott Powers

Department of Medicine, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

R. Scott Rector

NextGen Precision Health, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, USA

Cell Biology and Physiology, Internal Medicine, University of Kansas Medical Center, Kansas City, KS, USA

John Thyfault

Center for Skeletal Muscle Research at Robert M. Berne Cardiovascular Research Center, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Department of Medicine, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Department of Pharmacology, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

Fralin Biomedical Research Institute, Center for Exercise Medicine Research at Virginia Tech Carilion, Roanoke, VA, USA

Department of Human Nutrition, Foods, and Exercise, College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Department of Computational and Systems Biology, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Ali Tugrul Balci & Maria Chikina

Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Biosciences, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Samuel G. Moore

Department of Medicine, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Karan Uppal

Department of Cell, Developmental, and Integrative Biology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

Marcas Bamman & Anna Thalacker-Mercer

Department of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA

Bryan C. Bergman, Daniel H. Bessesen, Wendy M. Kohrt, Edward L. Melanson, Kerrie L. Moreau, Irene E. Schauer & Robert S. Schwartz

Department of Medicine, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA

Thomas W. Buford

Human Performance Laboratory, Ball State University, Muncie, IN, USA

Toby L. Chambers, Bridget Lester, Scott Trappe & Todd A. Trappe

Translational Research Institute, AdventHealth, Orlando, FL, USA

Paul M. Coen, Bret H. Goodpaster & Lauren M. Sparks

Department of Pediatrics, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA

Dan Cooper, Fadia Haddad & Shlomit Radom-Aizik

Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Kishore Gadde, Melissa Harris, Neil M. Johannsen, Tuomo Rankinen & Eric Ravussin

College of Nursing, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora, CO, USA

Catherine M. Jankowski

Department of Medicine, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Nicolas Musi

Population and Public Health, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

Robert L. Newton Jr

Biochemistry and Structural Biology, Center for Metabolic Health, Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, TX, USA

Blake B. Rasmussen

Barshop Institute for Longevity and Aging Studies, University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, TX, USA

Elena Volpi

MoTrPAC Study Group

Primary authors

Lead Analysts

, Nicole R. Gay
, Pierre M. Jean-Beltran

Lead Data Generators

, Surendra Dasari
, Courtney Dennis
, Charles R. Evans
, David A. Gaul
, Olga Ilkayeva
, Anna A. Ivanova
, Maureen T. Kachman
, Hasmik Keshishian
, Ian R. Lanza
, Ana C. Lira
, Michael J. Muehlbauer
, Venugopalan D. Nair
, Paul D. Piehowski
, Jessica L. Rooney
, Kevin S. Smith
, Cynthia L. Stowe
& Bingqing Zhao
Natalie M. Clark
, David Jimenez-Morales
, Malene E. Lindholm
, Gina M. Many
, James A. Sanford
, Gregory R. Smith
, Nikolai G. Vetr
, Tiantian Zhang
, Bingqing Zhao
, Jose J. Almagro Armenteros
, Julian Avila-Pacheco
, Nasim Bararpour
, Yongchao Ge
, Zhenxin Hou
, Shruti Marwaha
, David M. Presby
, Archana Natarajan Raja
, Evan M. Savage
, Alec Steep
, Yifei Sun
, Si Wu
& Jimmy Zhen

Animal Study Leadership

, Karyn A. Esser
, Laurie J. Goodyear
& Simon Schenk

Manuscript Writing Group Leads

Nicole R. Gay
& David Amar

Manuscript Writing Group

Malene E. Lindholm
, Simon Schenk
, Stephen B. Montgomery
, Sue C. Bodine
, Facundo M. Fernández
, Stuart C. Sealfon
, Michael P. Snyder
& Tiantian Zhang

Senior Leadership

Joshua N. Adkins
, Euan Ashley
, Charles F. Burant
, Steven A. Carr
, Clary B. Clish
, Gary Cutter
, Robert E. Gerszten
, William E. Kraus
, Jun Z. Li
, Michael E. Miller
, K. Sreekumaran Nair
, Christopher Newgard
, Eric A. Ortlund
, Wei-Jun Qian
, Russell Tracy
, Martin J. Walsh
& Matthew T. Wheeler

Co-corresponding Authors

Bioinformatics center.

, Karen P. Dalton
, Trevor Hastie
, Steven G. Hershman
, Mihir Samdarshi
, Christopher Teng
, Rob Tibshirani
, Matthew T. Wheeler

Biospecimens Repository

Elaine Cornell
, Nicole Gagne
, Sandy May
& Russell Tracy

Administrative Coordinating Center

Brian Bouverat
, Christiaan Leeuwenburgh
, Ching-ju Lu
& Marco Pahor

Data Management, Analysis, and Quality Control Center

Fang-Chi Hsu
, Scott Rushing
& Michael P. Walkup

Exercise Intervention Core

& W. Jack Rejeski
& Ashley Xia

Contributions

All authors reviewed and revised the manuscript. Detailed author contributions are provided in the Supplementary Information .

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Sue C. Bodine , Karyn A. Esser , Simon Schenk , Stephen B. Montgomery , Michael P. Snyder , Steven A. Carr or Matthew T. Wheeler .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

S.C.B. has equity in Emmyon, Inc. G.R.C. sits on data and safety monitoring boards for AI Therapeutics, AMO Pharma, Astra-Zeneca, Avexis Pharmaceuticals, Biolinerx, Brainstorm Cell Therapeutics, Bristol Meyers Squibb/Celgene, CSL Behring, Galmed Pharmaceuticals, Green Valley Pharma, Horizon Pharmaceuticals, Immunic, Mapi Pharmaceuticals, Merck, Mitsubishi Tanabe Pharma Holdings, Opko Biologics, Prothena Biosciences, Novartis, Regeneron, Sanofi-Aventis, Reata Pharmaceuticals, NHLBI (protocol review committee), University of Texas Southwestern, University of Pennsylvania, Visioneering Technologies, Inc.; serves on consulting or advisory boards for Alexion, Antisense Therapeutics, Biogen, Clinical Trial Solutions LLC, Genzyme, Genentech, GW Pharmaceuticals, Immunic, Klein-Buendel Incorporated, Merck/Serono, Novartis, Osmotica Pharmaceuticals, Perception Neurosciences, Protalix Biotherapeutics, Recursion/Cerexis Pharmaceuticals, Regeneron, Roche, SAB Biotherapeutics; and is the president of Pythagoras Inc., a private consulting company. S.A.C. is a member of the scientific advisory boards of Kymera, PrognomiQ, PTM BioLabs, and Seer. M.P.S. is a cofounder and scientific advisor to Personalis, Qbio, January AI, Filtricine, SensOmics, Protos, Fodsel, Rthm, Marble and scientific advisor to Genapsys, Swaz, Jupiter. S.B.M. is a consultant for BioMarin, MyOme and Tenaya Therapeutics. D.A. is currently employed at Insitro, South San Francisco, CA. N.R.G. is currently employed at 23andMe, Sunnyvale, CA. P.M.J.B. is currently employed at Pfizer, Cambridge, MA. Insitro, 23andMe and Pfizer had no involvement in the work presented here.

Peer review

Peer review information.

Nature thanks Atul Deshmukh, Jorge Ruas and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer review reports are available.

Additional information

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Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 animal phenotyping and data availability..

a-d) Clinical measurements before and after the training intervention in untrained control rats (SED), 4-week trained rats (4w), and 8-week trained rats (8w). Data are displayed pre and post for each individual rat (connected by a line), with males in blue and females in pink. Filled symbols (n = 5 per sex and time point) represent rats used for all omics analyses, whereas the rat utilized for proteomics only (n = 1 per sex and time point) is represented by a non-filled symbol. Significant results by ANOVA of the overall group effect (#, p < 0.05; ##, p < 0.01) and interaction between group and time (§, p < 0.05; §§ p < 0.01) are indicated. Significant within-group differential responses from a Bonferroni post hoc test are indicated (*, q-value < 0.05; **, q-value < 0.01). a) Aerobic capacity through a VO 2 max test until exhaustion. Data are reported in ml/(kg.min) for all individual rats and time points. b) Body fat percentage. c) Percent lean mass. ( b-c ) were assessed through nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. d) Body weight (in grams). e) Description of available datasets. Colored cells indicate that data are available for that tissue and assay. Individual panels and platforms are shown for metabolomics and the multiplexed immunoassays. f) Detailed availability of sample-level data across assays. Each column represents an individual animal, ordered by training group and colored by sex. Gray cells indicate that data were generated for that animal and assay; black cells indicate that data were not generated. Rows are ordered by ome and colored by assay and tissue.

Extended Data Fig. 2 Quality control metrics for omics data.

a) Proteomics multiplexing design using TMT11 reagents for isobaric tagging and a pooled reference sample. The diagram describes processing of a single tissue. Following multiplexing, peptides were used for protein abundance analysis, serial PTM enriched for phosphosite and optional acetylsite quantification, or ubiquitylsite quantification through enrichment of lysine-diglycine ubiquitin remnants. b) Total number of fully quantified proteins per plex in each global proteome dataset. c-e) The total number of fully quantified phosphosites (c) , acetylsites (d) , and ubiquitylsites (e) per plex in each dataset. f) Distributions of coefficients of variation (CVs) calculated from metabolomics features identified in pooled samples and analyzed periodically throughout liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry runs. CVs were aggregated and plotted separately for named and unnamed metabolites. g) Transcription start site (TSS) enrichment (top) and fraction of reads in peaks (FRiP, bottom) across ATAC-seq samples per tissue. h) Distributions of RNA integrity numbers (RIN, top) and median 5′ to 3′ bias (bottom) across samples in each tissue in the RNA-Seq data. i) Percent methylation of CpG, CHG and CHH sites in the RRBS data. For boxplots in (h,i) : center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; filled dots represent outliers. j) Number of wells across multiplexed immunoassays with fewer than 20 beads. Measurements from these 182 wells were excluded from downstream analysis. k) 2D density plot of targeted analytes’ mean fluorescence intensity (MFI) versus corresponding CHEX4 MFI from the same well for each multiplexed immunoassay measurement, where CHEX4 is a measure of non-specific binding.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Permutation tests.

a-b) Permutation tests of groups within males (a) and females (b) . For each sex, the original group labels were shuffled to minimize the number of animal pairs that remain in the same group. Only the group labels were shuffled and all other covariates remained as in the original data. For each permuted dataset, the differential abundance pipeline was rerun and the number of transcripts that were selected at 5% FDR adjustment were re-counted. c-d) Permutation tests of sex within groups. For each group and each sex, half of the animals were selected randomly and their sex was swapped. Only the sex labels were shuffled and all other covariates remained as in the original data. For each permutation the differential analysis pipeline was rerun and the timewise summary statistics were extracted. A gene was considered sexually dimorphic if for at least one time point the z-score (absolute) difference between males and females was greater than 3. c) Counts of sexually dimorphic genes among the IHW-selected genes of the original data. d) Counts of sexually dimorphic genes among the 5% FDR selected genes within each permuted dataset. Each boxplot in (a-d) represents the differential abundance analysis results over 100 permutations of the transcriptomics data in a specific tissue. Center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; open circles represent outliers. Added points represent the results of the true data labels, and their shape corresponds to the empirical p-value ( ● : p > 0.05; ×: 0.01 < p < 0.05; *: p ≤ 0.01).

Extended Data Fig. 4 Correlations between proteins and transcripts throughout endurance training.

a) Number of tissues in which each gene, including features mapped to genes from all omes, is training-regulated. Only differential features from the subset of tissues with deep molecular profiling (lung, gastrocnemius, subcutaneous white adipose, kidney, liver, and heart) and the subset of omes that were profiled in all six of these tissues (DNA methylation, chromatin accessibility, transcriptomics, global proteomics, phosphoproteomics, multiplexed immunoassays) were considered. Numbers above each bar indicate the number of genes that are differential in exactly the number of tissues indicated on the x-axis. b) Pathways significantly enriched by tissue-specific training-regulated genes represented in Fig. 2a (q-value < 0.1). KEGG and Reactome pathways were queried, and redundant pathways were removed (i.e., those with an overlap of 80% or greater with an existing pathway). c) Heatmaps showing the Pearson correlation between the TRNSCRPT and PROT timewise summary statistics (z- and t-scores, respectively) (top, gene-level) and pathway-level enrichment results (Gene Set Enrichment Analysis normalized enrichment scores) (bottom, pathway-level). d) Scatter plots of pathway GSEA NES of the TRNSCRPT and PROT datasets in the seven tissues for which these data were acquired. Pathways showing high discordance or agreement across TRNSCRPT and PROT and with functional relevance or general interest were highlighted.

Extended Data Fig. 5 Heat shock response.

a) Scatter plots of the protein t-scores (PROT) versus the transcript z-scores (TRNSCRPT) by gene at 8 weeks of training (8 W) relative to sedentary controls. Data are shown for the seven tissues for which both proteomics and transcriptomics was acquired. Red points indicate genes associated with the heat shock response, and the labeled points indicate those with a large differential response at the protein level. b-c) Line plots showing protein b) and transcript (c) log 2 fold-changes relative to the untrained controls for a subset of heat shock proteins with increased abundance during exercise training. Each line represents a protein in a single tissue.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Regulatory signaling pathways modulated by endurance training.

a) Heatmap of differences in TF motif enrichment in training-regulated genes across tissues. Each value reflects the average difference in motif enrichment for shared transcription factors. Tissues are clustered with complete linkage hierarchical clustering. b) (left) Filtered PTM-SEA results for the liver showing kinases and signaling pathways with increased activity. (right) Heatmap showing t-scores for phosphosites within the HGF signaling pathway. c) Hypothetical model of HGF signaling effects during exercise training. Phosphorylation of STAT3 and PXN is known to modulate cell growth and cell migration, respectively. Error bars=SEM. d) Filtered PTM-SEA results for the heart showing selected kinases with significant enrichments in at least one time point. Heatmap shows the NES as color and enrichment p-value as dot size. Kinases are grouped by kinase family and sorted by hierarchical clustering. e) (top) Log 2 fold-change of GJA1 and CDH2 protein abundance in the heart. No significant response to exercise training was observed for these proteins (F-test; q-value > 0.05). (bottom) Log 2 fold-changes for selected Src kinase phosphosite targets, GJA1 pY265 and CDH2 pY820, in the heart. These phosphosites show a significant response to exercise training (F-test, 5% FDR). Error bars=SEM. f) Gene Set Enrichment Analysis (GSEA) results from the heart global proteome dataset using the matrisome gene set database. Heatmap shows NES as color and enrichment p-value as dot size. Rows are clustered using hierarchical clustering. g) Log 2 fold-change for basement membrane proteins in heart. Proteins showing a significant response to exercise training are highlighted in orange (F-test; 5% FDR). Error bars=SEM. h) Log 2 protein fold-change of NTN1 protein abundance in heart. A significant response to exercise training was observed for these proteins (F-test; 5% FDR). Error bars=SEM.

Extended Data Fig. 7 Graphical representation of differential results.

a) Number of training-regulated features assigned to groups of graphical states across tissues and time. Red points indicate features that are up-regulated in at least one sex (e.g., only in males: F0_M1; only in females: F1_M0; in both sexes: F1_M1), and blue points indicate features down-regulated in at least one sex (only in males: F0_M-1; only in females: F-1_M0; in both sexes: F-1_M-1). Green points indicate features that are up-regulated in males and down-regulated in females or vice versa (F-1_M1 and F1_M-1, respectively). Point size is proportional to the number of features. Point opacity is proportional to the within-tissue fraction of features represented by that point. Features can be represented in multiple points. The number of omes profiled in each tissue is provided in parentheses next to the tissue abbreviation. b) A schematic example of the graphical representation of the differential analysis results. Top: the z-scores of four features. A positive score corresponds to up-regulation (red), and a negative score corresponds to down regulation (blue). Bottom: the assignment of features to node sets and full path sets (edge sets are not shown for conciseness but can be easily inferred from the full paths). Node labels follow the [time]_F[x]_M[y] format where [time] shows the animal sacrifice week and can take one of (1w, 2w, 4w, or 8w), and [x] and [y] are one of (−1,0,1), corresponding to down-regulation, no effect, and up-regulation, respectively. c) Graphical representation of the feature sets. Columns are training time points, and rows are the differential abundance states. Node and edge sizes are proportional to the number of features that are assigned to each set.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Key pathway enrichments per tissue.

Key pathway enrichments for features that are up-regulated in both sexes at 8 weeks of training in each tissue. For display purposes, enrichment q-values were floored to 1e-10 (Enrichment FDR (−log10) = 10). Bars are colored by the number of omes for which the pathway was significantly enriched (q-value < 0.01) (lighter gray: 1 ome; darker gray: 2 omes; black: 3 omes). Pathways were selected from Supplementary Table 10 .

Extended Data Fig. 9 Associations with signatures of human health and complex traits.

a) Jaccard coefficients between gene sets identified by different omes in 8-week gastrocnemius up-regulated features (“X” marks overlap p > 0.05). b) Network connectivity p-values (Pathways, Biogrid, and string) among the gastrocnemius week-8 multi-omic genes and with the single-omic genes. c) Proportion of features from each ome represented in the gastrocnemius response clusters, identified by the network clustering analysis. d-g) Overlap between our rat vastus lateralis differential expression results and the meta-analysis of human long-term exercise studies by Amar et al. d-e) Spearman correlation (d) and its significance (e) between the meta-analysis fold-changes and the log 2 fold-changes foreach sex and time point. f) GSEA results. Genes were ranked by meta-analysis (−log 10 p-value*log 2 fold-change) and the rat training-differential, sex-consistent gene sets were tested for enrichment at the bottom of the ranking (negative scores) or the top (positive scores). g) Overlap between the rat gene sets from (f) and the high-heterogeneity human meta-analysis genes (I 2 > 75%). h) -log 10 overlap p-values (Fisher’s exact test), comparing rat female gastrocnemius and vastus lateralis week-8 differential transcripts from this study (p < 0.01) and the differential genes from the rat female soleus data of Bye et al. (p < 0.01). HCR: high capacity runners, LCR: low capacity runners. i) A comparison of rat gastrocnemius differential proteins from this study (p < 0.01) and the human endurance training proteomics results of Hostrup et al. (p < 0.01) using Fisher’s exact test. Left: -log 10 overlap p-values. Right: -log 10 sex concordance p-values. j) Statistics of the overlapping proteins from ( i ), week-8 female comparison (y: rat z-scores, x: human t-scores). k) DOSE disease enrichment results of the white adipose, kidney, and liver gene sets. DOSE was applied only on diseases that are relevant for each tissue. The network shows the results for the sex-consistent down-regulated features at week-8.

Extended Data Fig. 10 Characterization of the extent of sex difference in the endurance training response.

The extent of sex differences in the training response were characterized in two ways: first, by correlating log 2 fold-changes between males and females for each training-differential feature; second, by calculating the difference between the area under the log 2 fold-change curve for each training-differential feature, including a (0,0) point (Δ AUC , males - females). The first approach characterizes differences in direction of effect while the second approach characterizes differences in magnitude. Left plot for each tissue: density line plots of correlations from the first approach. Densities or correlations corresponding to features in each ome are plotted separately, with a label that provides the ome and the number of differential features represented. Right plot for each tissue: 2D density plot of Δ AUC against the correlation between the male and female log 2 fold-changes for each training-differential feature used to simultaneously evaluate sex differences in the direction and magnitude of the training response. Points at the top-center of these 2D density plots represent features with high similarity between males and females in terms of both direction and magnitude; features on the right and left sides of the plots represent features with greater magnitudes of response in males and females, respectively.

Extended Data Fig. 11 Sex differences in the endurance training response.

a) Heatmap of the training response of immunoassay analytes across tissues. Gray indicates no data. Bars indicate the number of training-regulated analytes in each tissue (top) and the number of tissues in which the analyte is training-regulated (right, 5% FDR). b) Training-differential cytokines across tissues. 5, 24, and 9 cytokines were annotated as anti-, pro-, and pro/anti- inflammatory, respectively. Bars indicate the number of annotated cytokines in each category that are differential (5% FDR). c) Counts of early vs. (1- or 2-week) vs. late (4- or 8-week) differential cytokines, according to states assigned by the graphical analysis, including all tissues. Cytokines with both early and late responses in the same tissue were excluded. d) Line plots of standardized abundances of training-differential features that follow the largest graphical path in the adrenal gland (i.e., 1w_F-1_M1 − >2w_F-1_M0 − >4w_F-1_M0 − >8w_F-1_M0 according to our graphical analysis notation). The black line represents the average value across all features. The closer a colored line is to this average, the darker it is (distance calculated using sum of squares). e) Line plots of transcript-level log 2 fold-changes corresponding to six transcription factors (TFs) whose motifs are significantly enriched by transcripts in (d) . TF motif enrichment q-values are provided in the legend (error bars = SEM). f) Male versus female NES from PTM-SEA in the lung. Anticorrelated points corresponding to PRKACA NES are in dark red. g) Line plots of standardized abundances of training-differential phosphosites that follow the largest graphical edges of phosphosites in the lung (1w_F1_M-1 − >2w_F1_M-1 − >4w_F0_M-1). h) Top ten kinases with the greatest over-representation of substrates (proteins) corresponding to training-differential phosphosites in (g) . MeanRank scores by library are shown, as reported by KEA3. i) Line plots showing phosphosite-level log 2 fold-changes of PRKACA phosphosite substrates identified in the lung as differential with disparate sex responses (error bars = SEM).

Extended Data Fig. 12 Assessment of immune responses to endurance training.

a) Heatmap of the number and percent of KEGG and Reactome immune pathways significantly enriched by training-regulated features at 8 weeks. b) Line plots of standardized abundances of training-differential proteins in white adipose tissue up-regulated only in males at 8 weeks. Black line shows average across all features. c) Boxplots of the sample-level Pearson correlation between markers of immune cell types, lymphatic tissue, or cell proliferation and the average value of features in (b) at the protein level. Center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; filled dots represent outliers. A pink point indicates that the marker is also one of the differential features plotted in (b) . # indicates when the distribution of Pearson correlations for a set of at least two markers is significantly different from 0 (two-sided one-sample t-test, 5% BY FDR). When only one marker is used to define a category on the y-axis, the gene name is provided in parentheses. d) Trajectories of mean absolute signal of various immune cell types in BAT or WAT-SC following deconvolution of bulk RNA-Seq with CIBERSORTx (error bars = SEM). e) Immune cell type enrichment analysis results of training-differentially expressed transcripts. Points represent significant enrichments (5% FDR, one-sided Mann-Whitney U test). f) Line plots showing the log 2 fold-changes for Cxcr3 and Il1a transcripts in the small intestine (error bars = SEM).

Extended Data Fig. 13 Metabolic effects of endurance training.

a) Significant enrichments for relevant categories of KEGG metabolism pathways from features that are up- or down- regulated in both sexes at 8 weeks (8w_F1_M1 and 8w_F-1_M-1 nodes, respectively). Triangles point in the direction of the response (up or down). Points are colored by ome. b) Log 2 fold-change of metabolites regulated across many tissues (F-Test, 5% FDR, error bars=SEM). c) Log 2 fold-change of training-regulated metabolites: 1-methylhistidine in the kidney, cortisol in the kidney, and 1-methylnicotinamide in the liver (F-Test, 5% FDR, error bars = SEM). d) Volcano plots showing abundance changes (log 2 fold-changes; logFC) and significance (-log 10 nominal p-values) for acyl-carnitines. Features are colored based on the carnitine chain length. e) Protein abundance changes in the glycolysis and gluconeogenesis pathway in the heart tissue after 8 weeks of training. Line plots show the log 2 fold-changes over the training time course (error bars = SEM). Red and blue boxes indicate a statistically significant (F-test, 5% FDR) increase and decrease in abundance, respectively, for both males and females at 8 weeks.

Extended Data Fig. 14 Mitochondria and peroxisome adaptations to endurance training.

a) Boxplots showing the percent of mitochondrial genome reads across samples in each tissue that map to the mitochondrial genome (% MT reads). b) Comparison of % MT reads between untrained controls and animals trained for 8 weeks. Plot shows tissues with a statistically significant change after 8 weeks in at least one sex (red asterisk, two-sided Dunnett’s test, 10% FDR). For boxplots in (b,c) : center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; filled dots represent outliers. c) Boxplots showing the percent of mitochondrial genome reads across tissue, sex, and time points. Center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; open circles represent outliers. Red asterisks indicate a significant change throughout the training time course (F-test, 5% FDR). Center line represents median; box bounds represent 25th and 75th percentiles; whiskers represent minimum and maximum excluding outliers; blue dots represent outliers. d) GSEA using the MitoCarta MitoPathways gene set database and transcriptome (TRNSCRPT) or phosphoproteome (PHOSPHO) differential analysis results. NES are shown for significant pathways (10% FDR) for all tissues, sexes, and time points within the heatmap. Mitochondria pathways (rows) are grouped using the parental group in the MitoPathways hierarchy. e) Protein abundance and protein acetylation level changes in the peroxisome KEGG pathway in the liver tissue after 8 weeks of training. Red boxes indicate an increase in abundance for both males and females, while red circles indicate an increase in at least one acetylsite within the protein (8w_F1_M1 cluster).

Supplementary information

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MoTrPAC Study Group., Lead Analysts. & MoTrPAC Study Group. Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance exercise training. Nature 629 , 174–183 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06877-w

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Received : 21 September 2022

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06877-w

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The Essays of Elia
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Charles Lamb: Essays Summary
Charles Lamb: Essays Summary. In his Essays of Elia and its sequel, Last Essays of Elia, Charles Lamb explores a broad range of topics and works with various non-fiction tropes that often edge into the terrain of fiction. We see him writing obituaries, dream journals, diatribes, and tributes. What unifies Lamb's essays is his lyrical ...
Essays of Elia
Essays of Elia is a collection of essays written by Charles Lamb; it was first published in book form in 1823, with a second volume, Last Essays of Elia, issued in 1833 by the publisher Edward Moxon . The essays in the collection first began appearing in The London Magazine in 1820 and continued to 1825. Lamb's essays were very popular and were ...
Essays of Elia/Last Essays of Elia Summary
Summary. The essays Charles Lamb wrote for London Magazine in the early 1820's, which were collected in the Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia, mark the acme of his literary achievement and ...
Essays of Elia
sister Mary Ann Lamb. Charles Lamb (born Feb. 10, 1775, London, Eng.—died Dec. 27, 1834, Edmonton, Middlesex) was an English essayist and critic, best known for his Essays of Elia (1823-33). Lamb went to school at Christ's Hospital, where he studied until 1789. He was a near contemporary there of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and of Leigh Hunt.
Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb
A humble clerk with the East India Company for much of his life, Charles Lamb (1775-1834) came into his own writing essays "under the phantom cloud of Elia". This assumed name, borrowed from ...
Essays of Elia
Quick Reference. Miscellaneous essays by C. Lamb. The first series appeared in the London Magazine, 1820-23, and as a separate volume 1823. The Last Essays of Elia were published in 1833. Lamb adopted the name Elia, which was that of a former Italian clerk at the South Sea House, ostensibly to save the embarrassment of his brother John, who ...
Charles Lamb: Essays of Elia
His first Essays of Elia was published in 1823 and his Last Essays of Elia was first published in 1833. In his absolutely marvelous essays, Lamb writes about life in all its humble and daily, as ...
9 Charles Lamb, Elia, and Essays in Familiarity
Lamb and Elia, 'the man and his familiar', in the words of A. C. Ward, were a constant presence in the essays of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. 7 His work exerted a powerful influence on the development of the familiar essay genre, and part of the purpose of this chapter is to bring 'Elia's Ghost' into full view in contemporary conversations about the essay—and to ...
Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of "Elia" allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination.
The Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb was considered the most delightful of English essayists in the middle of the 19th century. Essays of Elia is a collection of his finest work. Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using ...
Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb, one of the most engaging personal essayists of all time, began publishing his unforgettable, entertaining Elia essays in the London Magazine in 1820; they were so immediately popular that a book-length collection was published in 1823. Inventing the persona of "Elia" allowed Lamb to be shockingly honest and to gain a playful distance for self-examination.
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Charles Lamb, by Walter Jerrold
ESSAYS. In giving this summary account of Lamb's writings it has been thought best only to keep to a very roughly chronological method, leaving his letters to be touched upon last. ... The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death, open with a "Character of the late Elia"—an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which ...
The Essays of Elia : Charles Lamb : Free Download, Borrow, and
"An exact reprint of the text of the original edition of T̀he essays of Elia,' 1823 and T̀he last essays of Elia,' 1833." Addeddate 2008-02-13 16:44:12
Charles Lamb: Essays Summary and Analysis of "Old China"
Analysis. "Old China" is often considered something of a riddle amongst Lamb's essays, as it drifts into a memory in a similarly fluid manner that Elia drifts into the tea ceremony scene that he gazes at in the piece of china earlier in the story. In both the case of the scene in the china and his conversation with Bridget, drinking tea opens a ...
The essays of Elia,
Book/Printed Material The essays of Elia, View 264 images in sequence. Transcript: PDF | FULL TEXT | XML. Download: PDF Text ( all pages ) JPEG (2143x3381px) JPEG (1071x1690px) JPEG (535x845px) JPEG2000 (707.0 KB)
Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb
Summary by https: //www.gradesaver.com ... An essay by Elia is like following a meandering path. One begins with the author's delight in the paintings on teacups, spends 2/3 of the essay reading a cousin's lament that they are now rich enough to afford to collect china but were happier when they had to scrape for their smallest pleasures, and ...
Elia and the Last Essays of Elia
Charles Lamb wrote essays under the pseudonym "Elia" in the 1820s. Few have written more evocatively of the past, of childhood, loss, books and plays, and London. This volume, published in the Oxford World's Classics series, contains all the "Elia" essays Lamb collected in book form, including the "Confessions of a Drunkard."
Elia; and The Last Essays of Elia : Charles Lamb
The essays first began appearing in The London Magazine in 1820 and continued to 1825. They were very popular and were printed in many subsequent editions throughout the nineteenth century. The personal and conversational tone of the essays has charmed many readers. Lamb himself is the Elia of the collection, and his sister Mary is "Cousin ...
The Essays of Elia
1854. Part One of Five. English essayist and poet, Charles Lamb (pen name Elia), studied at Christ's Hospital where he formed a lifelong friendship with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When he was twenty years old Lamb suffered a period of insanity. His sister, Mary Ann Lamb, had similar problems and in 1796 murdered her mother in a fit of madness.
Dream Children by Charles Lamb Summary & Analysis
Essays of Elia was the first volume of his essays that was published in 1828 while the second volume of his essays, named, The Last Essays of Elia was published in 1833. His essays have a unique combination of wit, reflection, anecdote, and fancy. He died on December 27, 1834.
Essays of Elia
Page 252 - In the same hour came forth fingers of a man's hand, and wrote over against the candlestick upon the plaster of the wall of the king's palace ; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance was changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his loins were loosed, and his knees smote one against another.
Essays of Elia, The
The Oxford Companion to English Literature (7 ed.) Edited by: Dinah Birch. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Print Publication Date: 2009. Print ISBN-13: 9780192806871. Published online:
The essays of Elia : Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834
The essays of Elia by Lamb, Charles, 1775-1834. Publication date 1915 Publisher London : Dent ; New York : Dutton Collection cdl; americana Contributor University of California Libraries Language English. Bibliography: p. xix Notes. Very narrow margins. Addeddate 2008-09-18 21:08:56
War in Gaza, Shibboleths on Campus
Essay. Shibboleth. In the campus protests over the war in Gaza, language and rhetoric are—as they have always been when it comes to Israel and Palestine—weapons of mass destruction.
Temporal dynamics of the multi-omic response to endurance ...
Fig. 1: Summary of the study design and multi-omics dataset. To identify the main temporal or sex-associated responses in each tissue, we summarized the graphical cluster sizes by tissue and time ...

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