nt in his able and
bitter self-defence to pay tribute to a generosity he is too honest
to claim. After all, who but Charles Lamb ever _did_ receive gifts
well? Scott tried, to be sure. No man ever sinned less than he against
the law of kindness. But Lamb did not need to try. He had it in his
heart of gold to feel pleasure in the presents which his friends took
pleasure in giving him. The character and quality of the gifts were
not determining factors. We cannot analyze this disposition. We can
only admire it from afar.

"I look upon it as a point of morality to be obliged to those who
endeavour to oblige me," says Sterne; and the sentiment, like most
of Sterne's sentiments, is remarkably graceful. It has all the
freshness of a principle never fagged out by practice. The rugged
fashion in which Emerson lived up to his burdensome ideals prompted
him to less engaging utterances. "It is not the office of a man to
receive gifts," he writes viciously. "How dare you give them? We wish
to be self-sustained. We do not quite forgive a giver. The hand that
feeds us is in some danger of being bitten."

Carlyle is almost as disquieting. He searches for, and consequently
finds, unworthy feelings both in the man who gives, and holds himself
to be a benefactor, and in the man who receives, and burdens himself
with a sense of obligation. He professes a stern dislike for presents,
fearing lest they should undermine his moral stability; but a man
so up in morals must have been well aware that he ran no great risk
of parting with his stock in trade. He probably hated getting what
he did not want, and finding himself expected to be grateful for it.
This is a sentiment common to lesser men than Carlyle, and as old
as the oldest gift-bearer. It has furnished food for fables,
inspiration for satirists, and cruel stories at which the
light-hearted laugh. Mr. James Payn used to tell the tale of an
advocate who unwisely saved a client from the gallows which he should
have graced; and the man, inspired by the best of motives, sent his
benefactor from the West Indies a case of pineapples in which a colony
of centipedes had bred so generously that they routed every servant
from the unfortunate lawyer's house, and dwelt hideously and
permanently in his kitchen. "A purchase is cheaper than a gift," says
a wily old Italian proverb, steeped in the wisdom of the centuries.

The principle which prompts the selection of gifts--since selected
they all a