llectual epicureanism, which has had the effect of winning
for these, then almost forgotten, poets, one generation after another of
enthusiastic students. Could he but have known how fresh a source of
culture he was evoking there for other generations, through all those
years in which, a little wistfully, he would harp on the limitation of
his time by business, and sigh for a better fortune in regard to
literary opportunities!

To feel strongly the charm of an old poet or moralist, the literary
charm of Burton, for instance, or Quarles, or The Duchess of Newcastle;
and then to interpret that charm, to convey it to others--he seeming to
himself but to hand on to others, in mere humble ministration, that of
which for them he is really the creator--this is the way of his
criticism; cast off in a stray letter often, or passing note, or
lightest essay or conversation. It is in such a letter, for instance,
that we come upon a singularly penetrative estimate of the genius and
writings of Defoe.

Tracking, with an attention always alert, the whole process of their
production to its starting-point in the deep places of the mind, he
seems to realise the but half-conscious intuitions of Hogarth or
Shakespeare, and develops the great ruling unities which have swayed
their actual work; or "puts up," and takes, the one morsel of good stuff
in an old, forgotten writer. Even in what he says casually there comes
an aroma of old English; noticeable echoes, in chance turn and phrase,
of the great masters of style, the old masters. Godwin, seeing in
quotation a passage from _John Woodvil_, takes it for a choice fragment
of an old dramatist, and goes to Lamb to assist him in finding the
author. His power of delicate imitation in prose and verse reaches the
length of a fine mimicry even, as in those last essays of Elia on
Popular Fallacies, with their gentle reproduction or caricature of Sir
Thomas Browne, showing, the more completely, his mastery, by
disinterested study, of those elements of the man which were the real
source of style in that great, solemn master of old English, who, ready
to say what he has to say with fearless homeliness, yet continually
overawes one with touches of a strange utterance from worlds afar. For
it is with the delicacies of fine literature especially, its gradations
of expression, its fine judgment, its pure sense of words, of
vocabulary--things, alas! dying out in the English literature of the
present, toge