.. Ten thousand times I have confessed to
you, talking of my talents, my utter inability to remember in any
comprehensive way what I have read. I can vehemently applaud, or
perversely stickle, at parts; but I cannot grasp at a whole. This
infirmity (which is nothing to brag of) may be seen in my two
little compositions, the tale and my play, in both which no reader,
however partial, can find any story.'

'My brain,' he says, in a letter to Wordsworth, 'is desultory, and
snatches off hints from things.' And, in a wise critical letter to
Southey, he says, summing up himself in a single phrase: 'I never judge
system-wise of things, but fasten upon particulars.'

Is he, in these phrases that are meant to seem so humble, really
apologising for what was the essential quality of his genius? Montaigne,
who (it is Lamb that says it) 'anticipated all the discoveries of
succeeding essayists,' affected no humility in the statement of almost
exactly the same mental complexion. 'I take the first argument that
fortune offers me,' he tells us; 'they are all equally good for me; I
never design to treat them in their totality, for I never see the whole
of anything, nor do those see it who promise to show it to me.... In
general I love to seize things by some unwonted lustre.' There, in the
two greatest of the essayists, one sees precisely what goes to the
making of the essayist. First, a beautiful disorder: the simultaneous
attack and appeal of contraries, a converging multitude of dreams,
memories, thoughts, sensations, without mental preference, or conscious
guiding of the judgment; and then, order in disorder, a harmony more
properly musical than logical, a separating and return of many elements,
which end by making a pattern. Take that essay of _Elia_ called _Old
China_, and, when you have recovered from its charm, analyse it. You
will see that, in its apparent lawlessness and wandering like idle
memories, it is constructed with the minute care, and almost with the
actual harmony, of poetry; and that vague, interrupting, irrelevant,
lovely last sentence is like the refrain which returns at the end of a
poem.

Lamb was a mental gipsy, to whom books were roads open to adventures; he
saw skies in books, and books in skies, and in every orderly section of
social life magic possibilities of vagrancy. But he was also a Cockney,
a lover of limit, civic tradition, the uniform of all ritual. He liked
excepti