written seems to proceed from a
blank intellect, not from a man clothed with fleshly peculiarities and
differences. These peculiarities and differences neither do, nor
(generally speaking) _could_ intermingle with the texture of the
thoughts so as to modify their force or their direction. In such
books--and they form the vast majority--there is nothing to be found or
to be looked for beyond the direct objective. (_Sit venia verbo!_) But
in a small section of books, the objective in the thought becomes
confluent with the subjective in the thinker--the two forces unite for a
joint product; and fully to enjoy the product, or fully to apprehend
either element, both must be known. It is singular and worth inquiring
into, for the reason that the Greek and Roman literature had no such
books. Timon of Athens, or Diogenes, one may conceive qualified for this
mode of authorship, had journalism existed to rouse them in those days;
their "articles" would no doubt have been fearfully caustic. But as they
failed to produce anything, and Lucian in an after age is scarcely
characteristic enough for the purpose, perhaps we may pronounce Rabelais
and Montaigne the earliest of writers in the class described. In the
century following theirs came Sir Thomas Browne, and immediately after
him La Fontaine. Then came Swift, Sterne, with others less
distinguished; in Germany, Hippel the friend of Kant, Harmann the
obscure, and the greatest of the whole body--John Paul Friedrich
Richter. In him, from the strength and determinateness of his nature as
well as from the great extent of his writing, the philosophy of this
interaction between the author as a human agency and his theme as an
intellectual reagency might best be studied. From him might be derived
the largest number of cases, illustrating boldly this absorption of the
universal into the concrete--of the pure intellect into the human nature
of the author. But nowhere could illustrations be found more
interesting--shy, delicate, evanescent--shy as lightning, delicate and
evanescent as the colored pencilings on a frosty night from the Northern
Lights, than in the better parts of Lamb.

To appreciate Lamb, therefore, it is requisite that his character and
temperament should be understood in their coyest and most wayward
features. A capital defect it would be if these could not be gathered
silently from Lamb's works themselves. It would be a fatal mode of
dependency upon an alien and separable