yielding to restraint. In estimating the humour of
Elia, we must no more forget the strong undercurrent of this great
misfortune and pity, than one could forget it in his actual story. So
he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a
dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.
Rosamund Grey, written in his twenty-third year, a story with something
bitter and exaggerated, an almost insane fixedness of gloom perceptible
in it, strikes clearly this note in his work.

For himself, and from his own point of view, the exercise of his gift,
of his literary art, came to gild or sweeten a life of monotonous
labour, and seemed, as far as regarded others, no very important thing;
availing to give them a little pleasure, and inform them a little,
chiefly in a retrospective manner, but in no way concerned with the
turning of the tides of the great world. And yet this very modesty,
this unambitious [109] way of conceiving his work, has impressed upon
it a certain exceptional enduringness. For of the remarkable English
writers contemporary with Lamb, many were greatly preoccupied with
ideas of practice--religious, moral, political--ideas which have since,
in some sense or other, entered permanently into the general
consciousness; and, these having no longer any stimulus for a
generation provided with a different stock of ideas, the writings of
those who spent so much of themselves in their propagation have lost,
with posterity, something of what they gained by them in immediate
influence. Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley even--sharing so largely in
the unrest of their own age, and made personally more interesting
thereby, yet, of their actual work, surrender more to the mere course
of time than some of those who may have seemed to exercise themselves
hardly at all in great matters, to have been little serious, or a
little indifferent, regarding them.

Of this number of the disinterested servants of literature, smaller in
England than in France, Charles Lamb is one. In the making of prose he
realises the principle of art for its own sake, as completely as Keats
in the making of verse. And, working ever close to the concrete, to
the details, great or small, of actual things, books, persons, and with
no part of them blurred to his vision by the intervention of mere
abstract theories, he has reached an enduring moral effect [110] also,
in a sort of boundless sympathy. Unoccupied, as he might see