found
or to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit venia verbo!_)

But in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes
confluent with the subjective in the thinker--the two forces unite
for a joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to
apprehend either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth
inquiring into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had
no such books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive
qualified for this mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse
them in those days; their "articles" would no doubt have been
fearfully caustic. But as they failed to produce anything, and Lucian
in an after age is scarcely characteristic enough for the purpose,
perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais and Montaigne the earliest of
writers in the class described. In the century following theirs came
Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately after him La Fontaine. Then came
Swift, Sterne, with others less distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the
friend of Kant, Harmann the obscure, and the greatest of the whole
body--Jean Paul Friedrich Richter. In him, from the strength and
determinateness of his nature as well as from the great extent of his
writing, the philosophy of this interaction between the author as a
human agency and his theme as an intellectual reagency might best be
studied. From him might be derived the largest number of cases,
illustrating boldly this absorption of the universal into the
concrete--of the pure intellect into the human nature of the author.
But nowhere could illustrations be found more interesting--shy,
delicate, evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and evanescent as the
colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern Lights, than in
the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and
temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward
features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered
silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of
dependency upon an alien and separable accident if they needed an
external commentary. But they do not. The syllables lurk up and down
the writings of Lamb, which decipher his eccentric nature. His
character lies there dispersed in anagram; and to any attentive reader
the regathering and restoration of the total word from its scattered
parts is inevitable without an effort. Still it is always a