origin. His jests add a new reverence to lovely and noble
things, or light up an unsuspected 'soul of goodness in things evil.'

No man ever so loved his friends, or was so honest with them, or made
such a religion of friendship. His character of Hazlitt in the 'Letter
to Southey' is the finest piece of emotional prose which he ever wrote,
and his pen is inspired whenever he speaks of Coleridge. 'Good people,
as they are called,' he writes to Wordsworth, 'won't serve. I want
individuals. I am made up of queer points and want so many answering
needles.' He counts over his friends in public, like a child counting
over his toys, when some one has offered an insult to one of them. He
has delicacies and devotions towards his friends, so subtle and so noble
that they make every man his friend. And, that love may deepen into awe,
there is the tragic bond, that protecting love for his sister which was
made up of so many strange components: pity for madness, sympathy with
what came so close to him in it, as well as mental comradeship, and that
paradox of his position, by which he supports that by which he is
supported.

It is, then, this 'human, too human' creature, who comes so close to our
hearts, whom we love and reverence, who is also, and above all, or at
least in the last result, that great artist in prose, faultless in tact,
flawless in technique, that great man of letters, to whom every lover of
'prose as a fine art' looks up with an admiration which may well become
despair. What is it in this style, this way of putting things, so
occasional, so variegated, so like his own harlequin in his 'ghastly
vest of white patchwork,' 'the apparition of a dead rainbow'; what is it
that gives to a style, which no man can analyse, its 'terseness, its
jocular pathos, which makes one feel in laughter?' Those are his own
words, not used of himself; but do they not do something to define what
can, after all, never be explained?

IV

Lamb's defects were his qualities, and nature drove them inward,
concentrating, fortifying, intensifying them; to a not wholly normal or
healthy brain, freakish and without consecution, adding a stammering
tongue which could not speak evenly, and had to do its share, as the
brain did, 'by fits.' 'You,' we find Lamb writing to Godwin,

'cannot conceive of the desultory and uncertain way in which I (an
author by fits) sometimes cannot put the thoughts of a common
letter into sane prose..