hesitate to make "cults" of the ones that appeared most appealing. If
he had Philistine feelings, he indulged them without shame. If he
had recondite and "artistic" feelings, he indulged them also without
shame. He is one of the few great men not afraid to be un-original,
and hence he is the most original of all. "I cannot," says he, "sit and
think. Books think for me." Well, books did "think for him," for he
managed to press the books of the great poets into his service, as no
mortal writer has ever dared to do before. And he could do it
without impairing his originality, because he was as original as the
great poets he used. We say deliberately "poets," for, as Pater points
out, to find Lamb's rivals in sheer imaginative genius, we have to
leave the company of those who write prose.

Do the humorous ecclesiastics and scholarly tutors who profess to
understand Elia ever peep into that Essay called "Witches," or that
other Essay called "A Child-Angel"? There are things here that are
written for a very different circle. Certain sentences in
"Dream-children," too, have a beauty that takes a natural man's breath
completely away. Touches of far-off romance, terrible and wistful as
"anonymous ballads," alternate with gestures of Rabelaisian humour,
such as generous souls love. Elia's style is the only thing in English
prose that can be called absolutely perfect. Compared with the rich,
capricious, wilful, lingering by the way of Lamb's manner, Pater's is
precise, demure and over-grave, Wilde's fantastic and over-provocative,
Ruskin's intolerably rhetorical.

Into what other prose style could the magic of Shakespeare's "little
touches" be drawn, or the high melancholy of Milton's imagery be
led, without producing a frightful sense of the incongruous? He can
quote them both--or any other great old master--and if it were not
for the "inverted commas" we should not be aware of the insertion.

Elia cannot say anything, not the simplest thing, without giving it a
turn, a twist, a lift, a lightness, a grace, that would redeem the very
grease-spots on a scullion's apron!

There is no style in the world like it. Germany, France, Italy, Russia
have no Charles Lamb. Their Flauberts and D'Annunzios belong to a
different tribe. Even Turgenieff, just because he has to "get on with
his story" cannot do precisely this.

Every single one of the "essays" and most of the "letters" can be
read over and over again, and their cadences cares