our and felicitous
jesting about his own person. A man who has a snug berth other people
want feels free to crack such jokes.

Of the contents of these three volumes we can say deliberately what Dr.
Johnson said, surely in his haste, of Baxter's three hundred works, 'Read
them all, they are all good.' Do not be content with the essays alone.
It is shabby treatment of an author who has given you pleasure to leave
him half unread; it is nearly as bad as keeping a friend waiting. Anyhow,
read _Mrs. Leicester's School_; it is nearly all Mary Lamb's, but the
more you like it on that account the better pleased her brother would
have been.

We are especially glad to notice that Mr. Ainger holds us out hopes of an
edition, uniform with the works, of the letters of Charles Lamb. Until
he has given us these, also with notes, his pious labours are incomplete.
Lamb's letters are not only the best text of his life, but the best
comment upon it. They reveal all the heroism of the man and all the
cunning of the author; they do the reader good by stealth. Let us have
them speedily, so that honest men may have in their houses a complete
edition of at least one author of whom they can truthfully say, that they
never know whether they most admire the writer or love the man.

EMERSON.

There are men whose charm is in their entirety. Their words occasionally
utter what their looks invariably express. We read their thoughts by the
light of their smiles. Not to see and hear these men is not to know
them, and criticism without personal knowledge is in their case
mutilation. Those who did know them listen in despair to the
half-hearted praise and clumsy disparagement of critical strangers, and
are apt to exclaim, as did the younger Pitt, when some extraneous person
was expressing wonder at the enormous reputation of Fox, 'Ah! you have
never been under the wand of the magician.'

Of such was Ralph Waldo Emerson. When we find so cool-brained a critic
as Mr. Lowell writing and quoting thus of Emerson:

'Those who heard him while their natures were yet plastic, and their
mental nerves trembled under the slightest breath of divine air, will
never cease to feel and say:

'"Was never eye did see that face
Was never ear did hear that tongue,
Was never mind did mind his grace
That ever thought the travail long;
But eyes, and ears, and every thought
Were with his sweet perfections caught;"'