mes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable,
but for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The
book is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being [112] sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate intellectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another
of enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source
of culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all
those years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the
limitation of his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in
regard to literary opportunities!

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance,
that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and
writings of Defoe.

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good
stuff in an old, forgotten writer. Even [113] in what he says casually
there comes an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn
and phrase, of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin,
seeing in quotation a passage from John Woodvil, takes it for a choice
fragment of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding
the author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches
the length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir
Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by
disinterested stu