oom perceptible in it,
strikes clearly this note in his work.

For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty, this
unambitious way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon it a certain
exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable English writers
contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with ideas of
practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since, in some
sense or other, entered permanently into the general consciousness;
and, these having no longer any stimulus for a generation provided with
a different stock of ideas, the writings of those who spent so much of
themselves in their propagation have lost, with posterity, something of
what they gained by them in immediate influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth,
Shelley even--sharing so largely in the unrest of their own age, and
made personally more interesting thereby, yet, of their actual work,
surrender more to the mere course of time than some of those who may
have seemed to exercise themselves hardly at all in great matters, to
have been little serious, or a little indifferent, regarding them.

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to the
details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with no
part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere abstract
theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect also, in a sort of
boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might seem, with great matters, he
is in immediate contact with what is real, especially in its caressing
littleness, that littleness in which there is much of the whole woeful
heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with a perfect
understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of pathos in
him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the _Weltschmerz_, the
constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with him: but what a gift
also for the enjoym