nd soften the energy of marginal annotations on a pedant scholar. In
the letter in which he announces the first essays of _Elia_, he writes
to Barron Field: 'You shall soon have a tissue of truth and fiction,
impossible to be extricated, the interleavings shall be so delicate, the
partitions perfectly invisible.' The correspondents were already
accustomed to this 'heavenly mingle.' Few of the letters, those works of
nature, and almost more wonderful than works of art, are to be taken on
oath. Those elaborate lies, which ramify through them into patterns of
sober-seeming truth, are in anticipation, and were of the nature of a
preliminary practice for the innocent and avowed fiction of the essays.
What began in mischief ends in art.

II

'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all
that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather
myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who
pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know
whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately
to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the
usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since
seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which
imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things,
this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination
came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all
through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good
world, which he knows--which was created so lovely, beyond his
deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people
have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says
in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth;
the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was
a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that
was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy.
Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to
others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living,
and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left
to others to remember him by.

Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters,
religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last
century';