tastical and artistically artificial, it must be owned he is so. His
humour, exquisite as it is, is modish. It may not be for all markets.
How it affected the Scottish Thersites we know only too well--that dour
spirit required more potent draughts to make him forget his misery and
laugh. It took Swift or Smollett to move his mirth, which was always,
three parts of it, derision. Lamb's elaborateness, what he himself calls
his affected array of antique modes and phrases, is sometimes overlooked
in these strange days, when it is thought better to read about an author
than to read him. To read aloud the _Praise of Chimney Sweepers_ without
stumbling, or halting, not to say mispronouncing, and to set in motion
every one of its carefully-swung sentences, is a very pretty feat in
elocution, for there is not what can be called a natural sentence in it
from beginning to end. Many people have not patience for this sort of
thing; they like to laugh and move on. Other people, again, like an
essay to be about something really important, and to conduct them to
conclusions they deem worth carrying away. Lamb's views about
indiscriminate almsgiving, so far as these can be extracted from his
paper _On the Decay of Beggars in the Metropolis_, are unsound, whilst
there are at least three ladies still living (in Brighton) quite
respectably on their means, who consider the essay entitled _A Bachelor's
Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People_ improper. But, as a rule,
Lamb's essays are neither unsound nor improper; none the less they are,
in the judgment of some, things of naught--not only lacking, as Southey
complained they did, 'sound religious feeling,' but everything else
really worthy of attention.

To discuss such congenital differences of taste is idle; but it is not
idle to observe that when Lamb is read, as he surely deserves to be, as a
whole--letters and poems no less than essays--these notes of fantasy and
artificiality no longer dominate. The man Charles Lamb was far more
real, far more serious, despite his jesting, more self-contained and self-
restrained, than Hazlitt, who wasted his life in the pursuit of the
veriest will-o'-the-wisps that ever danced over the most miasmatic of
swamps, who was never his own man, and who died, like Brian de Bois
Gilbert, 'the victim of contending passions.' It should never be
forgotten that Lamb's vocation was his life. Literature was but his
byplay, his avocation in the true s