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[261] America. Shelley tells us how utterly ignored Charles Lamb was in his prime by the English public, and Willis tells us that it was not so in America. He says in his Letters from under a Bridge--his only thoroughly attractive book--“How profoundly dull was England to the merits of Charles Lamb until he died. . . . America was posterity to him. The writings of all our young authors were tinctured with imitation of his style, when in England (as I personally know) it was difficult to light upon a person who had read Elia.” It was an American, Charles Stearns Wheeler, one of Emerson's early disciples, who collected in the Athenaeum library the scattered numbers of Fraser's magazine, thus bringing together the fragments of Sartor Resartus, which was published in a volume in Boston before it appeared in that form in England. The same Charles Wheeler went to England soon after and bore to Tennyson the urgent request of his American admirers that he would reprint his early volumes; which he did in the two-volume edition which appeared in 1842. The cheap, early, double-columned [1841] edition of Browning's Bells and Pomegranates found subscribers
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