For readers in that century Lamb's literary methods defied analysis—a sentimental view which was ultimately resisted by critics such as Graham Greene, F. R. Leavis, and the American New Critics, with the consequent diminution of his reputation, beginning in the decade preceding World War II. Recent scholars, however, have found new qualities in his writings, confirming his strength and steadiness of vision, his compassionate worldview, and his originality. His
Tales from Shakespear (1807), a children's book written with his sister has never been out of print.
In his Romantic Cruxes (1987) Thomas McFarland finds that among the Romantics, "Lamb, Hazlitt and De Quincey are very substantial figures, not dizzying elevations like Wordsworth and Coleridge, perhaps, but definitely mountains, not outlying hills." In his introduction to Lamb as Critic (1980) Roy Park who says Lamb has been perceived as a "cultural teddybear in the Victorian Establishment," goes on to show that Lamb is not only a good critic but a great one. Park provides more than three hundred pages of Lamb's criticism to prove his point. According to Park the limited range of Lamb's critical writings "does not entail a corresponding limitation in the range of his critical sensibilities." Park documents the enormous range of Lamb's reading and credits him with "a strong independent mind, contemptuous of critical fashions, and with a penetrating insight into what is of permanent and lasting value in literature." Lamb was among the first to appreciate Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, and the works of John Clare and William Blake, including Blake's paintings.
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