ent of life in its subtleties, of enjoyment actually
refined by the need of some thoughtful economies and making the most of
things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others. The
quaint remarks of children which another would scarcely have heard, he
preserves--little flies in the priceless amber of his Attic wit--and has
his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William Blake has written, with so
much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's Song), valuing carefully
their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white sheets in stolen sleep
at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story, anticipating something of the
mood of our deep humourists of the last generation. His simple
mother-pity for those who suffer by accident, or unkindness of nature,
blindness for instance, or fateful disease of mind like his sister's,
has something primitive in its largeness; and on behalf of ill-used
animals he is early in composing a _Pity's Gift._

And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead _do_ care at all
for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and
Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that
stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite
appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for, what
has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his literary
criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. It was as
loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self first, for
instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too was done: he
has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his subject. For
though "defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of the sweet food of
academic institution," he is yet essentially a scholar, and all his work
mainly retrospective, as I said; his own sorrows, affections,
perceptions, being alone real to him of the present. "I cannot make
these present times," he says once, "present to _me_."

Above all, he becomes not merely an expositor, permanently valuable, but
for Englishmen almost the discoverer of the old English drama. "The book
is such as I am glad there should be," he modestly says of the
_Specimens of English Dramatic Poets who lived about the time of
Shakespeare_; to which, however, he adds in a series of notes the very
quintessence of criticism, the choicest savour and perfume of
Elizabethan poetry being sorted, and stored here, with a sort of
delicate inte