erature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was
always in pure literary fashion. He was a bookman writing for those
who love things of the mind which can only be passed from generation
to generation by means of books. In this we may recognize the
reason--wholly unconscious to the writer--for the allusiveness of his
style: it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as
much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or passage
to which allusion is made. In the sixteenth century such allusiveness
was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient classics;
but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in
Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.

Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this
section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the
style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen. To
his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness
for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the
richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with
fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts. In one of
his early letters to Coleridge where he mentions having just finished
reading Chapman's Homer, Lamb, seizing upon a phrase in that
translation, says with gusto, "what _endless egression of phrases_ the
dog commands." The word arrided him (to employ another, the use of
which he recovered for us), and he could not forbear making a note of
it. He had, indeed, something of an instinctive genius for finding
words that had passed more or less into desuetude, and a happy way of
re-introducing them to enrich the plainer prose of his day. He did it
naturally, even as though inevitably, and without any such air of
coxcombical affectation as would have destroyed the flavour of the
whole. Lamb was so thoroughly imbued with the thought and modes of
expression of the rich Elizabethan and Stuart periods that his use of
obsolescent words was probably more often than not quite unconscious.

The egotism of Elia's style in addressing his readers has been said to
be founded on that of Sir Thomas Browne, and in a measure there can be
little doubt that it was so--but only in a measure, for it is
something the same egotism as that of Montaigne, is, indeed, the
natural attitude of the familiar essayist who must be egotistic, not
from self-consciousness but f