re genuine,
and has given more "vital signs that it will live," than a thing of
yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this sense the
spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something
substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind; or rather his
imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his writings
recalls to our fancy the _stranger_ on the grate, fluttering in its dusky
tenuity, with its idle superstition and hospitable welcome!

Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to
new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of
self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical
advantage, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does not
rely upon or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in
abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great gulph
between him and them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship,
all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety. He has no grand
swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no passing
topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the present, he
mocks the future. His affections revert to and settle on the past, but
then, even this must have something personal and local in it to interest
him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing
manners; brings down the account of character to the few straggling
remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond the bills of
mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism and disinterested
humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern metropolis, or describes
the manners of the last age, so well as Mr. Lamb--with so fine, and yet so
formal an air--with such vivid obscurity, with such arch piquancy, such
picturesque quaintness, such smiling pathos. How admirably he has sketched
the former inmates of the South-Sea House: what "fine fretwork he makes of
their double and single entries!" With what a firm, yet subtle pencil he
has embodied _Mrs. Battle's Opinions on Whist_! How notably he embalms a
battered _beau_; how delightfully an amour, that was cold forty years ago,
revives in his pages! With what well-disguised humour, he introduces us to
his relations, and how freely he serves up his friends! Certainly, some of
his portraits are _fixtures_, and will do to hang up as lasting and lively
emblems of hu