mb probably
looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of
the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among
virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have
been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the
Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long
succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from
the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be
disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can
read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb's enthusiasm, however, who never
could have read them with his own.

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse's books, he took down
Lamb's _Specimens of the English Dramatic Poets_, and, turning to Mr.
Gosse, said, "That book taught me more than any other book in the
world--that and the Bible." Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other
men's enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the
Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb
had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of
phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne
had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did
not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was
carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a
beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to
Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his
attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a
spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly
virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to
entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal
Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been
clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but
retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays
like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle.
Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for
saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse--and still more of
his prose--has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.

His posthumous book on the Elizabet