ABSTRACT
And herein is shown the vast distance of such men from Shakespeare. The airy amplitudes, the azure spaces of his mind, are apparent to everyone. The others stifle you with murderous walls. And it is, perhaps, not altogether fanciful to surmise that this very characteristic of their art may have had something to do with the secret of its special fascination for Charles Lamb. External nature, it is notorious, had no hold upon him; that exquisite genius was anything but at home under the open sky. The world as seen by a picturesque torchlight rather than by candid sunlight attracted his gaze. And it was a torchlighted world, a world of alternate deep shadow and vivid glare, of Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro, that he found in the minor Elizabethan drama....
