IN ON FAMILIAR STYLE, WILLIAM HAZLITT COMPARES CHARLES LAMB'S Elia Essays in the London Magazine to Erasmus's Colloquies or a fine piece of modern Latin, linking the archaic diction and syntax of Lamb's persona to the Latin exercises taught in English grammar schools. (1) Hazlitt also associates Elia's style with the classically educated authors of the Renaissance like Sir Thomas Browne. Elia's classicism complements the subject matter of the essays because he celebrates defunct institutions like the South Sea House and memorializes the old familiar faces of his youth. Through this seemingly obsolete classical style, Lamb creates a magazine persona by repurposing his training from Hospital, the London charity grammar school that he attended from 1782 to 1789. In this essay, I argue that the classical rhetorical practices of Hospital are crucial to understanding Lamb's Elian performances. Elia is a sophisticated schoolboy declaimer who repurposes classical writing exercises, ceremonial school oratory, and a ludic counter-curriculum in his essays. As Elia, Lamb translates these older rhetorical practices to address the middleclass readers of the London Magazine and playfully challenge their values. This reuse of classical rhetoric ties the seemingly apolitical, whimsical Elia to a history of classical education and enables him to make literary interventions in contemporary political debates. Lamb, through his comic persona, transforms stale school rhetorics into fresh literary performances that demonstrate the importance of classical rhetoric as a strategic resource for Romantic authors. My reading of classical rhetoric in the Elia essays extends recent efforts to recover Lamb's participation in Romantic-era political and cultural debates. Since the 1970s, critics have historicized the ways Lamb ironiz[es] conventional responses for new ends. (2) Scholars like Gerald Monsman, Karen Fang, Felicity James, and Mark Parker have discussed the veiled political commentary of the Elia essays in the context of Lamb's participation in 1790s Dissenter circles, the London Magazine, and the East India Company. (3) Simon Hull most recently has illuminated the political dimensions of the Elia essays in the London Magazine. Expanding on Jeffrey Cox's Cockney School, Hull places Lamb at the head of a metropolitan group that includes Leigh Hunt, Thomas De Quincey, and Hazlitt. This group, an 1820s counterpart to the Lake School, promotes an alternative model of Romantic authorship rooted in political engagement, periodicals, and urban sociability. (4) Yet despite the recent recovery of Lamb's work, few have discussed classical rhetoric in his performances as Elia. With the exception of Richard Clancey, who reads the essays alongside Horace's Epistles, most who discuss Lamb's education at Hospital focus on Lamb's Christ's Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago (LM, November 1820) and his non-Elia piece On Hospital and the Character of Hospital Boys (Gentleman's Magazine, June 1813). (5) They discuss the content of these essays, such as the class politics of the charity grammar school, rather than examine how this institution's practices are refracted in the rhetorical moves of Lamb's essays. While Lamb contributes to early-nineteenth-century debates about charity grammar schools, Hospital provides him with an impressive set of rhetorical tools with which to argue his stance, play with conventions, and establish his authorial position. By tracing how Lamb repurposes the rhetorical curriculum of Hospital, I suggest that he practices what Jerome Christensen calls hopeful anachronism, or the reuse of outdated practices in response to uncertainties regarding innovation, standardization, and competition. (6) Christensen argues that Romantic authors and contemporary literary scholars participate in the re-creation of the given in response to the cultural and political upheavals of their respective eras. …