and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so
was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that
he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and,
later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone
off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into
himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with
him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by
way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring
churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done.
To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over
it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not
lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude,
that he asked: 'Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer
holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats
and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and
fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and _irony
itself_--do these things go out with life?'

It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so
humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of
all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of
him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that
species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this
moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a
'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical,
'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and
sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone
stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth
of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the
most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.

Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid
out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the
most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write,
surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios.
'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I
love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not
walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and thin