on might
have silenced for ever the automaton that delivered it: but the
official personage in question at the close of the Session addressed an
extra-official congratulation to the Prince Regent on a bill that had
_not_ passed--as if to repeat and insist upon our errors were to justify
them.]

* * * * *

ELIA, AND GEOFFREY CRAYON.

So Mr. Charles Lamb and Mr. Washington Irvine choose to designate
themselves; and as their lucubrations under one or other of these _noms
de guerre_ have gained considerable notice from the public, we shall
here attempt to discriminate their several styles and manner, and to
point out the beauties and defects of each in treating of somewhat
similar subjects.

Mr. Irvine is, we take it, the more popular writer of the two, or a more
general favourite: Mr. Lamb has more devoted, and perhaps more judicious
partisans. Mr. Irvine is by birth an American, and has, as it were,
_skimmed the cream_, and taken off patterns with great skill and
cleverness, from our best known and happiest writers, so that their
thoughts and almost their reputation are indirectly transferred to his
page, and smile upon us from another hemisphere, like "the pale reflex
of Cynthia's brow:" he succeeds to our admiration and our sympathy by a
sort of prescriptive title and traditional privilege. Mr. Lamb, on the
contrary, being "native to the manner here," though he too has borrowed
from previous sources, instead of availing himself of the most popular
and admired, has groped out his way, and made his most successful
researches among the more obscure and intricate, though certainly not
the least pithy or pleasant of our writers. Mr. Washington Irvine has
culled and transplanted the flowers of modern literature, for the
amusement of the general reader: Mr. Lamb has raked among the dust and
cobwebs of a more remote period, has exhibited specimens of curious
relics, and pored over moth-eaten, decayed manuscripts, for the benefit
of the more inquisitive and discerning part of the public. Antiquity
after a time has the grace of novelty, as old fashions revived are
mistaken for new ones; and a certain quaintness and singularity of style
is an agreeable relief to the smooth and insipid monotony of modern
composition. Mr. Lamb has succeeded not by conforming to the _Spirit of
the Age_, but in opposition to it. He does not march boldly along with
the crowd, but steals off the pa