m, with
great matters, he is in immediate contact with what is real, especially
in its caressing littleness, that littleness in which there is much of
the whole woeful heart of things, and meets it more than half-way with
a perfect understanding of it. What sudden, unexpected touches of
pathos in him!--bearing witness how the sorrow of humanity, the
Weltschmerz, the constant aching of its wounds, is ever present with
him: but what a gift also for the enjoyment of life in its subtleties,
of enjoyment actually refined by the need of some thoughtful economies
and making the most of things! Little arts of happiness he is ready to
teach to others. The quaint remarks of children which another would
scarcely have heard, he preserves--little flies in the priceless amber
of his Attic wit--and has his "Praise of chimney-sweepers" (as William
Blake has written, with so much natural pathos, the Chimney-sweeper's
Song) valuing carefully their white teeth, and fine enjoyment of white
sheets in stolen sleep at Arundel Castle, as he tells the story,
anticipating something of the mood of our deep humourists of the last
generation. His simple mother-pity for those who suffer by accident,
or unkindness of nature, blindness for instance, or fateful disease of
mind like his sister's, has something primitive in its largeness; and
on behalf of ill-used animals he is early in composing a Pity's Gift.

[111] And if, in deeper or more superficial sense, the dead do care at
all for their name and fame, then how must the souls of Shakespeare and
Webster have been stirred, after so long converse with things that
stopped their ears, whether above or below the soil, at his exquisite
appreciations of them; the souls of Titian and of Hogarth too; for,
what has not been observed so generally as the excellence of his
literary criticism, Charles Lamb is a fine critic of painting also. It
was as loyal, self-forgetful work for others, for Shakespeare's self
first, for instance, and then for Shakespeare's readers, that that too
was done: he has the true scholar's way of forgetting himself in his
subject. For though "defrauded," as we saw, in his young years, "of
the sweet food of academic institution," he is yet essentially a
scholar, and all his work mainly retrospective, as I said; his own
sorrows, affections, perceptions, being alone real to him of the
present. "I cannot make these present times," he says once, "present
to me."

Above all, he beco