k. Books think for me.' He
was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to
be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most
extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and
partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the _Lyrical Ballads_ are
confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among
the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely
the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of
escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not
often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of
expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic
is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it
much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford,
and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of
Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of
Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge
is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he
can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his
very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly
detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a
would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.

Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has
been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so
intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he
speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, _On the Acting of
Munden_, which ends the book of _Elia_, with its great close, the
Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a
leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace
materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.'
He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly.
When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very
wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love
with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that
might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of
Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a
privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.