he may be said to have
copied (of course as genius copies) most, are Sterne and Sir Thomas
Browne. But between the actual letters and the actual works of these
two, themselves, there is a great difference, while (as has just been
noted) in Lamb's case there is none. The reason of course is that though
Sir Thomas is one of our very greatest authors and the Reverend Yorick
not by any means unplaced in the running for greatness, both are in the
highest degree artificial: while Lamb's way of writing, complex as it
is, necessitating as it must have done not a little reading and (as
would seem almost necessary) not a little practice, seems to run as
naturally as a child's babble. The very tricks--mechanical dots, dashes,
aposiopeses--which offend us now and then in Sterne; the unfamiliar
Latinisms which frighten some and disgust others in Browne, drop from
Lamb's lips or pen like the pearls of the Fairy story. Unless you are
born out of sympathy with Elia, you never think about them as tricks at
all. Now this naturalness--it can hardly be said too often here--is the
one thing needful in letters. The different forms of it may be as
various and as far apart from each other as those of the other Nature
in flora or fauna, on mountain and sea, in field and town. But if it is
there, all is right.

[Sidenote: BYRON]

There are few more interesting groups in the population of our subject
than that formed by the three poets whom we mentioned last when
classifying the epistolers of the early nineteenth century. There is
hardly one of them who has not been ranked by some far from contemptible
judgments among our greatest as poets; and merely as letter-writers they
have been put correspondingly high by others or the same. It is rather
curious that the most contested as to his place as a poet has been, as a
rule, allowed it most easily as a letter-writer. The enormous vogue
which Byron's verse at once attained both at home and abroad--has at
home if not abroad (where reputations of poets often depend upon
extra-poetical causes) long ceased to be undisputed: indeed has chiefly
been sustained by spasmodic and not too successful exertions of
individuals. It was never, of course, paralleled in regard to his
letters. But these letters early obtained high repute and have never, in
the general estimate, lost it. Some good judges even among those who do
not care very much for the poems, have gone so far as to put him among
our very best epistol