only to see or
be seen, "there were indeed a few in whose looks there appeared a
heavenly joy and gladness upon the entrance of a new day, as if they
had gone to sleep with expectation of it."

The industrious reader, indeed, might select out of these specimens
from Steele, a picture, in minute detail, of the characteristic manners
of that time. Still, beside, or only a little way beneath, such a
picture of passing fashion, what Steele and his fellows really deal
with is the least transitory aspects of life, though still merely
aspects--those points in which all human nature, great or little, finds
what it has in common, and directly shows itself up. The natural
strength of such literature will, of course, be in the line of its
tendencies; in transparency, variety, and directness. To the
unembarrassing matter, the unembarrassed style! Steele is, perhaps,
the most impulsive writer of the school [12] to which he belongs; he
abounds in felicities of impulse. Yet who can help feeling that his
style is regular because the matter he deals with is the somewhat
uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not imaginative, and
unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in Steele himself we may
observe with what sureness of instinct the men of that age turned aside
at the contact of anything likely to make them, in any sense, forget
themselves.

No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change which
was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our own; that
sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of intellectual
interest, which has many times torn and distorted literary style, even
with those best able to comprehend its laws. In Mrs. Leicester's
School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse (Macmillan), Mr. Ainger
has collected and annotated certain remains of Charles and Mary Lamb,
too good to lie unknown to the present generation, in forgotten
periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The story of the Odyssey,
abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for children--of all ages--will
speak for itself. But the garland of graceful stories which gives name
to the volume, told by a party of girls on the evening of their
assembling at school, are in the highest degree characteristic of the
brother and sister who were ever so successful in imparting to others
their own enjoyment of books and people. The tragic circums