perfect judgment of all-seeing _time_."
Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote: of
that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all
alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to
the glare of circumstances. There is a fine tone of _chiaro-scuro_, a
moral perspective in his writings. He delights to dwell on that which is
fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the
frailty of human nature. That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn
to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion:--that
piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial
glance. That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view
more genuine, and has given more "vital signs that it will live," than a
thing of yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow. Death has in this
sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author
something substantial in it. Ideas savour most of reality in his mind;
or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his
writings recals to our fancy the _stranger_ on the grate, fluttering in
its dusky tensity, with its idle superstition and hospitable welcome!

Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to
new customs. He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions
of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical
advantages, even to a nervous excess. It is not merely that he does
not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in
abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great
gulph between him and them. He disdains all the vulgar artifices of
authorship, all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety. He has no
grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no
passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain. He evades the
present, he mocks the future. His affections revert to, and settle on
the past, but then, even this must have something personal and local in
it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the
suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the
few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond
the bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point between egotism
and disinterested humanity. No one makes the tour of our southern
metropolis, or describe