t does to
the fingers of some men. He is regardless of appearances. He chooses
his friends neither for their fine houses nor their rare wines, but for
their humours, their goodness of heart, their capacities of making a
joke and of seeing one, and for their abilities, unknown often as the
woodland violet, but not the less sweet for obscurity. As a
consequence, his acquaintance is miscellaneous, and he is often seen at
other places than rich men's feasts. I do believe he is a gainer by
reason of his vagrant ways. He comes in contact with the queer corners
and the out-of-the-way places of human life. He knows more of our
common nature, just as the man who walks through a country, and who
strikes off the main road now and then to visit a ruin, or a legendary
cairn of stones, who drops into village inns, and talks with the people
he meets on the road, becomes better acquainted with it than the man
who rolls haughtily along the turnpike in a carriage and four. We lose
a great deal by foolish hauteur. No man is worth much who has not a
touch of the vagabond in him. Could I have visited London thirty years
ago, I would rather have spent an hour with Charles Lamb than with any
other of its residents. He was a fine specimen of the vagabond, as I
conceive him. His mind was as full of queer nooks and tortuous
passages as any mansion-house of Elizabeth's day or earlier, where the
rooms are cosey, albeit a little low in the roof; where dusty stained
lights are falling on old oaken panellings; where every bit of
furniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness; where portraits of
noble men and women, all dead long ago, are hanging on the walls; and
where a black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open on a seat
in the window. There was nothing modern about him. The garden of his
mind did not flaunt in gay parterres; it resembled those that Cowley
and Evelyn delighted in, with clipped trees, and shaven lawns, and
stone satyrs, and dark, shadowing yews, and a sun-dial, with a Latin
motto sculptured on it, standing at the farther end. Lamb was the
slave of quip and whimsey; he stuttered out puns to the detriment of
all serious and improving conversation, and twice or so in the year he
was overtaken in liquor. Well, in spite of these things, perhaps on
account of these things, I love his memory. For love and charity
ripened in that nature as peaches ripen on the wall that fronts the
sun. Although he did not blow hi