What idea of Lamb's personality is revealed in the essay Dream Children?

Ans: Lamb's autobiographical essay is essentially romantic. In Dream Children he unfolds the plight of his inner nature, his yearnings and longings. Being a genuine lover of London, Lamb never confined himself into the narrow domestic walls, rather, he loved to roam around into the streets of London and enjoy the cheer and murmurs of the streets. Wordsworth calls him “a scorner of the field.” Dream Children is a masterpiece of his response to the charms of the country. It also shows a great deal of his impression and appreciation of Nature which was an inspiration that he gathered from the canons of Milton & Marvel. Blakesware had an indelible impact on Lamb and like Hardy's Wessex. he could never come out of the spell of that place. He lived in an imaginative world where basking in the orangery he would fancy himself ripening too along with the oranges. More intense, perhaps, is Lamb's approach to the antiquities, the old ornaments of a life when life was marked by dignity and decorum. Hardy loved old customs but he had also accepted the modern scientific world but Lamb could not conceal his hatred of the tawdriness of modernity the prudery, the drabness of modem inventions. He felt comfortable amidst the "worn-out hangings, fluttering tapestry and carved oaken panels with the gliding almost rubbed out” of the old and lonely corridors of the ancient house.

Lamb could not marry Alice but he always remained a lover and never a snobbish admirer of wealth and rank. He got the dignity and uprightness of his grandmother, as well as her affection for all. In describing the great Norfolk mansion he has contrasted between the grace and natural dignity of the house-keeper and the foolish vulgarity of the wealthy house-owner.

Lamb had a spontaneous fondness for children, the love that a father can have. With a true parental affection, he narrates his stories to his dream children, satisfies their childish curiosity and tolerates their trifle follies. In some humorous lines he has shown his love for the children --"Here John smiled". "that would be foolish indeed", "Here little Alice spread her hand" and "Here John expanded all his eye-brows and tried to look courageous" and so on. Lamb got all his inspirations from a new intensified vision of the wistful loveliness of children, their innocence, their facile and generous emotions, their simplicity and their ingenuous haste to escape from grief to joy.

Thackeray has successfully called Lamb Saint Charles as we know that he is unanimously accepted as 'gentle-hearted Lamb continuously longed for past glory and it is his sane and amiable personality which evoked his mental purity and melancholy for the good old days.