Books: Frolic, Gentle Lamb

CHARLES LAMB AND HIS FRIENDS—Will D. Howe—Bobbs-Merrill ($3.50).

The rapt one, of the godlike forehead,

The heaven-eyed creature sleeps in earth;

And Lamb, the frolic and the gentle,

Has vanished from his lonely hearth.

Thus, in his Extempore Effusion upon the Death of James Hogg, Poet William Wordsworth solemnized the deaths of Poet-Critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Essayist Charles Lamb. Inhabitants of London's historic Inner Temple saw Lamb in a somewhat different context. Sometimes the door of his house near the Thames would open, and out would come Essayist Lamb and his sister Mary, carrying a...