ons, because, in every other instance, he would approve of the
rule. He broke bounds with exquisite decorum. There was in all his
excesses something of 'the good clerk.'

Lamb seemed to his contemporaries notably eccentric, but he was nearer
than them all to the centre. His illuminating rays shot out from the
very heart of light, and returned thither after the circuit. Where
Coleridge lost himself in clouds or in quicksands, Lamb took the nearest
short-cut, and, having reached the goal, went no step beyond it.

And he was a bee for honey, not, like Coleridge, a browsing ox. To him
the essence of delight was choice; and choice, with him, was readier
when the prize was far-fetched and dear bought: a rarity of manners,
books, pictures, or whatever was human or touched humanity. 'Opinion,'
he said, 'is a species of property; and though I am always desirous to
share with my friends to a certain extent, I shall ever like to keep
some tenets and some property properly my own.' And then he found, in
rarity, one of the qualities of the best; and was never, like most
others, content with the good, or in any danger of confusing it with the
best. He was the only man of that great age, which had Coleridge, and
Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the rest, whose taste was flawless. All the
others, who seemed to be marching so straight to so determined a goal,
went astray at one time or other; only Lamb, who was always wandering,
never lost sense of direction, or failed to know how far he had strayed
from the road.

The quality which came to him from that germ of madness which lay hidden
in his nature had no influence upon his central sanity. It gave him the
tragic pathos and mortal beauty of his wit, its dangerous nearness to
the heart, its quick sense of tears, its at times desperate gaiety; and,
also, a hard, indifferent levity, which, to brother and sister alike,
was a rampart against obsession, or a stealthy way of temporising with
the enemy. That tinge is what gives its strange glitter to his fooling;
madness playing safely and lambently around the stoutest common sense.
In him reason always justifies itself by unreason, and if you consider
well his quips and cranks you will find them always the play of the
intellect. I know one who read the essays of _Elia_ with intense
delight, and was astonished when I asked her if she had been amused. She
had seen so well through the fun to its deep inner meaning that the fun
had not detained her