imitive
prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out
of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers,
goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns--these all
came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London
so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done
as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by
whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver
in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and
hills.

And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he
confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation
of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his
appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was
a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I
wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in
air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his
mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to
Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received
from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again.... In
fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which
tourists call _romantic_, which I very much suspected before.' And to
Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the
last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt,
because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he
wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he
put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the
accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by
heart.

III

Beyond any writer pre-eminent for charm, Lamb had salt and sting. There
is hardly a known grace or energy of prose which he has not somewhere
exemplified; as often in his letters as in his essays; and always with
something final about it. He is never more himself than when he says,
briefly: 'Sentiment came in with Sterne, and was a child he had by
Affectation'; but then he is also never more himself than when he
expands and develops, as in this rendering of the hisses which damned
his play in Drury Lane:

It was not a hiss neither, but a sort of a frantic yell, like a
congregation of