call character, or the surface
emotions, which we call temperament. Here is a soul, one of the supreme
souls of humanity, speaking directly to that supreme soul which it has
apprehended outside humanity. Be sure that, if it forgets many things
which you, who overhear, would like it to have remembered, it will
remember everything which it is important to remember, everything which
the recording angel, who is the soul's finer criticism of itself, has
already inscribed in the book of the last judgment.

1897.

CHARLES LAMB

I

There is something a little accidental about all Lamb's finest work.
Poetry he seriously tried to write, and plays and stories; but the
supreme criticism of the _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_ arose out
of the casual habit of setting down an opinion of an extract just copied
into one's note-book, and the book itself, because, he said, 'the book
is such as I am glad there should be.' The beginnings of his
miscellaneous prose are due to the 'ferreting' of Coleridge. 'He ferrets
me day and night,' Lamb complains to Manning in 1800, 'to do something.
He tends me, amidst all his own worrying and heart-oppressing
occupations, as a gardener tends his young tulip.... He has lugged me to
the brink of engaging to a newspaper, and has suggested to me for a
first plan the forgery of a supposed manuscript of Burton, the
anatomist of melancholy'; which was done, in the consummate way we know,
and led in its turn to all the rest of the prose. And Barry Cornwall
tells us that 'he was almost teased into writing the _Elia_ essays.'

He had begun, indeed, deliberately, with a story, as personal really as
the poems, but, unlike them, set too far from himself in subject and
tangled with circumstances outside his knowledge. He wrote _Rosamund
Gray_ before he was twenty-three, and in that 'lovely thing,' as Shelley
called it, we see most of the merits and defects of his early poetry. It
is a story which is hardly a story at all, told by comment, evasion, and
recurrence, by 'little images, recollections, and circumstances of past
pleasures' or distresses; with something vague and yet precise, like a
dream partially remembered. Here and there is the creation of a mood and
moment, almost like Coleridge's in the _Ancient Mariner_; but these
flicker and go out. The style would be laughable in its simplicity if
there were not in it some almost awing touch of innocence; some hint of
that divine goodness which,