tance which
strengthened and consecrated their natural community of interest had,
one might think, something to do with the far-reaching pensiveness even
of their most humorous writing, touching often the deepest springs of
pity and awe, as the way of the highest humour is--a way, however, very
different from that of the humorists of the eighteenth century. But
one cannot forget also that Lamb was early an enthusiastic admirer of
Wordsworth: of Wordsworth, the first characteristic power of the
nineteenth century, his essay on whom, in the Quarterly Review, Mr.
Ainger here reprints. Would that he could have reprinted it as
originally composed, and ungarbled by Gifford, the editor! Lamb, like
Wordsworth, still kept the charm of a serenity, [14] a precision,
unsurpassed by the quietest essayist of the preceding age. But it might
have been foreseen that the rising tide of thought and feeling, on the
strength of which they too are borne upward, would sometimes overflow
barriers. And so it happens that these simple stories are touched,
much as Wordsworth's verse-stories were, with tragic power. Dealing
with the beginnings of imagination in the minds of children, they
record, with the reality which a very delicate touch preserves from
anything lugubrious, not those merely preventible miseries of childhood
over which some writers have been apt to gloat, but the contact of
childhood with the great and inevitable sorrows of life, into which
children can enter with depth, with dignity, and sometimes with a kind
of simple, pathetic greatness, to the discipline of the heart. Let the
reader begin with the "Sea Voyage," which is by Charles Lamb; and, what
Mr. Ainger especially recommends, the "Father's Wedding-Day," by his
sister Mary.

The ever-increasing intellectual burden of our age is hardly likely to
adapt itself to the exquisite, but perhaps too delicate and limited,
[15] literary instruments of the age of Queen Anne. Yet Mr. Saintsbury
is certainly right in thinking that, as regards style, English
literature has much to do. Well, the good quality of an age, the
defect of which lies in the direction of intellectual anarchy and
confusion, may well be eclecticism: in style, as in other things, it is
well always to aim at the combination of as many excellences as
possible--opposite excellences, it may be--those other beauties of
prose. A busy age will hardly educate its writers in correctness. Let
its writers make time t