Select Essays of Elia Author:Charles Lamb General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1909 Original Publisher: American book company Subjects: Essays Literary Collections / Essays Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you... more » get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: CHRIST'S HOSPITAL FIVE-AND-THIRTY YEARS AGO In Mr. Lamb's " Works," published a year or two since, I find a magnificent eulogy on my old school,1 such as it was, or now appears to him to have been, between the years 1782 and 1789. It happens, very oddly,' that my own standing at Christ's was nearly corresponding with 5 his; and, with all gratitude to him for his enthusiasm for the cloisters, I think he has contrived to bring together whatever can be said in praise of them, dropping all the other side of the argument most ingeniously. I remember L. at school; and can well recollect that he 10 had some peculiar advantages, which I and others of his school-fellows had not. His friends lived in town, and were near at hand; and he had the privilege of going to see them, almost as often as he wished, through some invidious distinction, which was denied to us. The pres-15 ent worthy sub-treasurer to the Inner Temple can explain how that happened. He had his tea and hot rolls in a morning, while we were battening upon our quarter of a 1 Recollections of Christ's Hospital. [C. L.] The notes which Lamb himself appended to the text, which are here numbered continuously with the rest, are marked by the letters C. L. in brackets. penny loaf -- our crug1 -- moistened with attenuated small beer, in wooden piggins, smacking of the pitched leathern jack it was poured from. Our Monday's milk porridge, blue and tasteless, and the pease soup of Saturday, coarse 5 and choking, were enriched for him with a slice of " extraordinar...« less