s upon "poor Charles Lamb," "dear Charles Lamb," "gentle
Charles Lamb," and the rest,--the final epithet, by the way being one
that Elia, living, specially resented:

"For God's sake," he wrote to Coleridge. "don't make me ridiculous any
more by terming me gentle-hearted in print, or do it in better verses.
It did well enough five years ago, when I came to see you, and was moral
coxcomb enough at the time you wrote the lines to feed upon such
epithets; but besides that the meaning of 'gentle' is equivocal at best,
and almost always means poor-spirited, the very quality of gentleness is
abhorrent to such vile trumpetings. My sentiment is long since vanished.
I hope my _virtues_ have done _sucking_. I can scarce think but you
meant it in joke. I hope you did, for I should be ashamed to believe
that you could think to gratify me by such praise, fit only to be a
cordial to some green-sick sonneteer."

The indulgent pity conventionally bestowed upon Charles Lamb--one of the
most manly, self-reliant of characters, to say nothing of his genius--is
absurdly' misplaced.

Still farther be it from us to blunt the edge of appetite by sapiently
essaying to "analyze" and account for Lamb's special zest and flavor, as
though his writings, or any others worth the reading, were put together
upon principles of clockwork. We are perhaps over-fond of these arid
pastimes nowadays. It is not the "sweet musk-roses," the "apricocks and
dewberries" of literature that please us best; like Bottom the Weaver,
we prefer the "bottle of hay." What a mockery of right enjoyment our
endless prying and sifting, our hunting of riddles in metaphors,
innuendoes in tropes, ciphers in Shakspeare! Literature exhausted, we
may turn to art, and resolve, say, the Sistine Madonna (I deprecate the
Manes of the "Divine Painter") into some ingenious and recondite rebus.
For such critical chopped-hay--sweeter to the modern taste than honey of
Hybla--Charles Lamb had little relish. "I am, sir," he once boasted to
an analytical, unimaginative proser who had insisted upon _explaining_
some quaint passage in Marvell or Wither, "I am, sir, a matter-of-lie
man." It was his best warrant to sit at the Muses' banquet. Charles Lamb
was blessed with an intellectual palate as fine as Keats's, and could
enjoy the savor of a book (or of that dainty, "in the whole _mundus
edibilis_ the most delicate," Roast Pig, for that matter) without
pragmatically asking, as the king did of the