hs
and Cowpers and Austens, and their modern representatives. It
needs something else in a Great-Aunt than old-fashioned irony to
appreciate _him._ It needs an imagination that is very nearly
"Shakespearean" and it needs a passion for beautiful style of which a
Flaubert or an Anatole France might be proud.

So here we have the old sly Elia, fooling people now as he fooled
them in his lifetime, and a riddle both to the godly and the ungodly.
The great Goethe, whose Walpurgis Night "He-Apes" made Elia put
out his tongue, read, we learn, with no little pleasure some fantastic
skit of this incorrigible one. Did he discern--the sublime Olympian--what
a cunning flute player lurked under the queer mask? "Something
between a Jew, a Gentleman and an Angel" he liked to fancy
he looked; and one must confess that in the subtlest of all
senses of that word, a gentleman he was.

Lamb's "essays" were written at off hours, when he could escape
from his office. Once completely freed from the necessity of office
work, his writing lost its magic. His genius was of that peculiarly
delicate texture which requires the stimulus of reaction. One cannot
be too grateful that the incomparable Pater, after Lamb himself,
perhaps, the greatest master of English prose, found it necessary to
utter his appreciation. Pater, as usual, hits the mark with an infallible
hand when he speaks of that overhanging Sophoclean tragedy which
darkened Lamb's earlier days and never quite left him.

It is, of course, this, the sense of one living always on the edge of a
precipice, that gives such piquancy and charm to Elia's mania for
"little things." Well might he turn to "little things," when great
things--his Sun and his Moon--had been turned for him to Blood!
But, as Pater suggests, there is "Philosophy" in all this, and more
Philosophy than many suppose. It is unfortunate that the unworldly
Coleridge and the worldly Thackeray should have both pitched upon
Lamb's "saintliness" to make copy of. Nothing infuriated him more
than such a tone towards himself. And he was right to be infuriated.
His "unselfishness," his "sweetness," of which these good men make
so much, were only one aspect of the Philosophy of his whole life.
Lamb was, in his life, a great epicurean philosopher, as, in all
probability, many other "saints" have been. The things in him that
fretted Carlyle, his fits of intoxication, his outbursts of capricious
impishness, his perversity and his irony,