his
language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
some of us.

'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
in my corner.'

We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
kind