in Lamb, needed the relief and savour of
the later freakishness to sharpen it out of insipidity. There is already
a sense of what is tragic and endearing in earthly existence, though no
skill as yet in presenting it; and the moral of it is surely one of the
morals or messages of _Elia_: 'God has built a brave world, but methinks
he has left his creatures to bustle in it how they may.'

Lamb had no sense of narrative, or, rather, he cared in a story only for
the moments when it seemed to double upon itself and turn into irony.
All his attempts to write for the stage (where his dialogue might have
been so telling) were foiled by his inability to 'bring three together
on the stage at once,' as he confessed in a letter to Mrs. Shelley;
'they are so shy with me, that I can get no more than two; and there
they stand till it is the time, without being the season, to withdraw
them.' Narrative he could manage only when it was prepared for him by
another, as in the _Tales from Shakespeare_ and the _Adventures of
Ulysses_. Even in _Mrs. Leicester's School_, where he came nearest to
success in a plain narrative, the three stories, as stories, have less
than the almost perfect art of the best of Mary Lamb's: of _Father's
Wedding-Day_, which Landor, with wholly pardonable exaggeration, called
'with the sole exception of the _Bride of Lammermoor_, the most
beautiful tale in prose composition in any language, ancient or modern.'
There is something of an incomparable kind of story-telling in most of
the best essays of _Elia_, but it is a kind which he had to find out, by
accident and experiment, for himself; and chiefly through
letter-writing. 'Us dramatic geniuses,' he speaks of, in a letter to
Manning against the taking of all words in a literal sense; and it was
this wry dramatic genius in him that was, after all, the quintessential
part of himself. 'Truth,' he says in this letter, 'is one and poor, like
the cruse of Elijah's widow. Imagination is the bold face that
multiplies its oil: and thou, the old cracked pipkin, that could not
believe it could be put to such purposes.' It was to his correspondents,
indeed to the incitement of their wakeful friendship, that he owes more
perhaps than the mere materials of his miracles.

To be wholly himself, Lamb had to hide himself under some disguise, a
name, 'Elia,' taken literally as a pen name, or some more roundabout
borrowing, as of an old fierce critic's, Joseph Ritson's, to heighten
a