Pathos, in Aristotelean terms, is the technique of persuading through appeal to the emotions. Lamb's essay uses pathos in many ways. The final reveal of the essay, of course, stands out in this regard—when we learn that the whole premise of the essay, in which Lamb recounts telling his children about their ancestors, has been a kind of dream and that Lamb in fact has no children at all, it is very sad. This sadness, however, is heightened by the emotions the audience is made to feel about the children beforehand. That is, we feel sad at the end because we have been made to feel close to these children over the course of the essay and because we come to believe in Elia's tenderness to these children.

Lamb accomplishes this through the use of detail. Some of this detail is fictional, while other details are likely taken from Lamb's life. Elia's brother John is a fictionalized representation of his own brother, and Elia's wife, Alice, is a version of Ann Simmons, who appears in other Lamb poems. The characterization of the children is completely made up but psychologically believable. They seem like real children.

Lamb appeals to the emotions of his reader to make a larger point, which is about lost opportunities. One way to read the essay is to understand it as a kind of warning about how one will regret not taking the opportunity to start a family, but beyond that, Lamb's point seems to have to do with the power of memory and the imagination. The regret Elia feels about not mourning his brother John, for instance, must be a genuine feeling on Lamb's part about his own moral failings. In that case, the emotion of the story serves as a way to challenge Lamb and the reader to be better people.