ther with the appreciation of them in our literature of the
past--that his literary mission is chiefly concerned. And yet, delicate,
refining, daintily epicurean, as he may seem, when he writes of giants
such as Hogarth or Shakespeare, though often but in a stray note, you
catch the sense of veneration with which those great names in past
literature and art brooded over his intelligence, his undiminished
impressibility by the great effects in them. Reading, commenting on
Shakespeare, he is like a man who walks alone under a grand stormy sky,
and among unwonted tricks of light, when powerful spirits might seem to
be abroad upon the air; and the grim humour of Hogarth, as he analyses
it, rises into a kind of spectral grotesque; while he too knows the
secret of fine, significant touches like theirs.

There are traits, customs, characteristics of houses and dress,
surviving morsels of old life, such as Hogarth has transferred so
vividly into _The Rake's Progress_, or _Marriage a la Mode_, concerning
which we well understand how, common, uninteresting, or even worthless
in themselves, they have come to please us at last as things
picturesque, being set in relief against the modes of our different age.
Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of cast-off
fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve--we
contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable
accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn and
self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which we
find quite tolerable in persons, because they convey to us the secret of
lifelike expression, and with regard to which we are all to some extent
humourists. But it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourists to
anticipate this pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his
own day; to look upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with
that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to
those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by
chance of its mere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of
an understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connection with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the