...He next stooped down to feel the pig, if there were any signs of life in it. He burnt his fingers, and to cool them he applied them in his booby fashion to his mouth…The truth at length broke into his slow understanding, that it was the pig that smelt so, and the pig that tasted so delicious; and, surrendering himself up to the new-born pleasure, he fell to tearing up whole handfuls of the scorched skin with the flesh next it, and was cramming it down his throat in his beastly fashion....

English poet and essayist. Born in London, Lamb left school at age fourteen and found work in an accountant's office where he was employed for twenty-five years. Along with his older sister Mary, Lamb wrote the popular children's book Tales from Shakespeare (1807), editions of which are still available today. As a poet Lamb received encouragement from his childhood friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but his poems never garnered the attention that Lamb hoped for; as an essayist, though, writing under the pen name "Elia," he published frequently in the London Magazine and became one of England's most admired authors, collecting his work in Essays of Elia (1823) and Last Essays of Elia (1833). See also gutenberg.org.