xcitement of his freedom from his six-and-thirty years'
confinement in a counting-house,--(he entered the office a dark-haired,
bright-eyed, light-hearted boy; he left it a decrepit, silver-haired,
rather melancholy, somewhat disappointed man, whose spirits, as he
himself confesseth, had grown gray before his hair,)--though, when in
the dizzy and happy early hours of his freedom, Elia exultingly wrote
(and felt) that "a man can never have too much time to himself," the
honeymoon (if I may so express it) of his emancipation from the

"Dry drudgery at the desk's dead wood"

was not fairly over before he felt that man's true element is
labor,--that occupation, which in his younger days he had called a
"fiend," was in very truth an angel,--the angel of contentment and joy.
Doctor Johnson stoutly maintained by both tongue and pen, that, in
general, no one could be virtuous or happy who was not completely
employed. Not only the bread we eat, but the true pleasures and real
enjoyments of life, must be earned by the sweat of the brow. The poor
old mill-horse, turned loose in the pasture on Sundays, seems sadly to
miss his accustomed daily round of weary labor; the retired
tallow-chandler, whose story has pointed so many morals and adorned so
many tales, would have died of inertia and ennui in less than six months
after his retirement from business, had not his successor kindly allowed
him to help on melting-days; and methinks the very ghosts of certain
busy and energetic men must fret and fume at the idle and inactive state
of their shadowy and incorporal selves; nor, unless--as some hope and
believe--we are to have our familiar and customary tasks and duties to
perform in heaven, could their souls be happy and contented in Paradise.

But--after this rather foolish and wholly unnecessary digression--to
return to Lamb. Elia, who had while a toil-worn clerk so carefully and
frugally husbanded every odd moment and spare hour of time,--who, after
his day's labor at India-House was over, had read so many massive old
folios, and written so many pleasant pages for the pleasure and
solacement of himself, and a choice and select number of men and
women,--now that he had the whole long day to himself, read but little,
and wrote but seldom.

And as for those long walks in the country, which he talked of so fondly
in some of his letters to his friends,--those walks to Hoddesdon, to
Amwell, to Windsor, and other towns and villages in