--in the one case very vigorous and
combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and
gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere. Addison is gay and witty and
delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the
translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and
likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from
a human soul.

The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into
writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century. They
brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm. They had the
confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest
their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper.
But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors.
Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is,
perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne. In Lamb
and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed,
the result of a compelling and shaping art. If one reads Lamb's earlier
essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him
consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their
idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own. By the
time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal
style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk.
They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so
waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing
with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ
music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is
incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk. Here one would say
is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one
taking. How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for
months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away
roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and
argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so
perfectly that his friends might have been deceived. And the personality
he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too. In life Lamb was a
nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with
the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a
repetition of it. One must assume him