. It might impart a gusto.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript
of his friend Manning's, and there have not been wanting critics who
have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have
sprung. Such will find in the seventeenth-century "Letters writ by a
Turkish Spy" the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of
sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his
fingers and applied them to his mouth--with precisely the same sequel
which followed on Bo-bo's escapade.

"A Bachelor's Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People" is a
delicate--perhaps partly ironical--description of a bachelor's
objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his
face. In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the
stage--partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, "On
the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;" and partly on its actors,
"On some of the Old Actors" and "On the Acting of Munden." Here again
we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected
method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The "Last Essays of Elia," published the year before Lamb's death,
open with a "Character of the late Elia"--an admirable piece of
self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his
own characteristics, physical and intellectual. In the first of the
essays, "Blakesmoor in H----shire," the author let his memory and
fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother
Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed
many happy holidays. Its tapestries, its haunted room, its "tattered
and diminished 'Scutcheon," its Justice Hall, its "costly fruit
garden, with its sun-baked southern wall," its "noble Marble Hall,
with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars--stately busts in
marble--ranged round," each of these recalled by memory suggests some
deep thought or some pleasant turn. The opening passage at once sets
the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb's
contemplative mood:

I do not know a pleasure more affecting than to range at
will over the deserted apartments of some fine old family
mansion. The traces of extinct grandeur admit of a better
passion than envy; and contemplations on the great and good,
whom we fancy in succession to have been its inhabitants,
weave for us illusions, in