“Some Perfect Sympathies”: Charles Lamb, Robert Burton, and Democritus Jr

This paper treats one of Charles Lamb’s early publications – The Curious Fragments – both from the point of view of its language, and from that of the literary persona that Lamb adopts in the writing. Although the language used is an attempt to mimic early modern English, it is not Lamb’s intention to produce a convincing forgery but rather to pay tribute to Robert Burton from whom Lamb borrows the “Anticke” style. This quite bizarre process, a veritable second degree impersonation – Lamb impersonates not the actual Democritus-philosopher, but Burton’s Democritus – has been labelled as Elizabethanizing.