The romantic spirit is marked by a sense of brooding melancholy.

In some writers it took the form of visualizing ideal states in the future, in some, like Lamb, it took the form of aching nostalgia for the past and its glories which were vanishing, being erased by inexorable time. The love and close affinity with past finds expression in his style. His love of past finds expression in most of his essays where he talks of buildings, places, people and events associated with his own past.

Christs Hospital is almost entirely built out of the memories of Lamb. His sense of nostalgia is most prominent in this essay, as he recounts his childhood experiences and his childhood life at his school, Christs Hospital, though under the assumed persona of Coleridge. He at the outset reveals his rather privileged status in comparison to his schoolmates, by virtue of his acquaintances, which he admits being ashamed of. Lamb reveals the tyrannical rule of the monitors, who used to punish the youngest students for any offence that had been committed by others, which included staying far away from fire during winter and not being allowed to drink water during summer and exposes the cool impunity with which the nurses used to take the food reserved for the children. He further recalls the cruel punishments meted out to the offenders, which included solitary confinements in rooms Lamb compares with the cells of a lunatic asylum, and a virtual ceremony of flogging, which Lamb compares to a ceremony in which heretics were burnt alive, that is, an auto da fe. Lamb speaks fondly of his master Matthew Field and longingly reminisces his time in the Lower Grammar School. Field was in no way strict, and did not coerce the students into reading ancient classics. He was a gentleman who generally engaged in gay parties. As a result, the boys used to spend their time indulging in mechanical or scientific operations, or making sun dials, or weaving cat-cradles and hundred other devices. The Upper grammar school, of which James Boyer was the master, presented an absolute contrasting image. The master himself epitomized the class, with his angry temperament, and penchant for flogging students. The students battered their brains over Xenophon and Plato and Terence. However, Lamb celebrates Boyer as being a great instructor under whom many pupils became Grecians and became renowned for the successes they enjoyed in their lives.