ne years after he had been pensioned off
from the India House), by Mr., afterwards Serjeant and Sir Thomas
Talfourd, has been gradually augmented, till it has at last found an
excellent and probably final editor in Canon Ainger.

It is in these two collections that Lamb presents himself in the
character which alone can confer on any man the first rank in
literature, the character of unicity--of being some one and giving
something which no one before him has given or has been. The _Essays of
Elia_ (a _nom de guerre_ said to have been taken from an Italian comrade
of the writer's elder brother John in the South Sea House, and directed
by Lamb himself to be pronounced "Ell-ia") elude definition not merely
as almost all works of genius do, but by virtue of something essentially
elvish and tricksy in their own nature. It is easy to detect in them--or
rather the things there are so obvious that there is no need of
detection--an extraordinary familiarity with the great "quaint" writers
of the seventeenth century--Burton, Fuller, Browne--which has supplied a
diction of unsurpassed brilliancy and charm; a familiarity with the
eighteenth century essayists which has enabled the writer to construct a
form very different from theirs in appearance but closely connected with
it in reality; an unequalled command over that kind of humour which
unites the most fantastic merriment to the most exquisite pathos; a
perfect humanity; a cast of thought which, though completely conscious
of itself, and not in any grovelling sense humble (Lamb, forgiving and
gentle as he was, could turn sharply even upon Coleridge, even upon
Southey, when he thought liberties had been taken with him), was a
thousand miles removed from arrogance or bumptiousness; an endlessly
various and attractive set of crotchets and whimsies, never divorced
from the power of seeing the ludicrous side of themselves; a fervent
love for literature and a wonderful gift of expounding it; imagination
in a high, and fancy almost in the highest degree. But when all this has
been duly set down, how much remains both in the essays and in the
letters, which in fact are chiefly distinguished from one another by the
fact that the essays are letters somewhat less discursive and somewhat
in fuller dress, the letters essays in the rough. For the style of Lamb
is as indefinable as it is inimitable, and his matter and method defy
selection and specification as much as the flutterings of a butter