Faith & Spirit Quote by Charles Lamb

Lamb turns literary taste into a bedside ritual, and the joke lands because it’s both pious and pointedly un-pious. By calling Shakespeare “one of the last books one should like to give up,” he frames reading as a kind of consolation right up to the brink. Then he spikes the sentiment with that sly qualification: “perhaps the one just before the Dying Service in a large Prayer book.” Shakespeare isn’t replacing religion; he’s queued beside it, impatiently close to the end, like a friend allowed into the sickroom until the official clergy arrives.

The phrasing does two things at once. It elevates Shakespeare to near-scriptural status while preserving Anglican decorum. Lamb knows the cultural hierarchy: prayer is the sanctioned language of mortality, the “Dying Service” the formal script for exiting the world. Yet he implies that Shakespeare’s language has a rival authority - not for doctrine, but for the emotional and psychological truth religion sometimes abstracts away. It’s a critic’s compliment disguised as a devotional aside.

Context matters: early 19th-century Britain is deep in bardolatry, with Shakespeare becoming a national moral resource as much as a playwright. Lamb, an essayist with a tender cynicism and a feel for how people actually live with books, resists pomp. He doesn’t say Shakespeare is sacred; he stages the moment when a reader, confronting death, clings to drama, wit, and human mess as long as propriety permits. The subtext is almost impolite: when the end is near, we may want poetry’s company before we accept the Church’s script.