canas or Metropolitanas) set out in an
array of Russia, or Morocco, when a tithe of that good
leather would comfortably re-clothe my shivering folios;
would renovate Paracelsus himself, and enable old Raymund
Lully to look himself again in the world. I never see these
impostors, but I long to strip them to warm my ragged
veterans in their spoils.

He passes on to a consideration of the fitting habiliments of books;
the sizes which appealed to him; the where and when to read: "I should
not care to be caught in the serious avenues of some cathedral alone
and reading 'Candide'!"--"The Old Margate Hoy" gives reminiscences of
a visit to the popular resort--with some uncomplimentary asides at
Hastings--in the days of the boy, "ill-exchanged for the foppery and
freshwater niceness of the modern steampacket," the boy that asked "no
aid of magic fumes, and spells, and boiling cauldrons." "The
Convalescent" expatiates upon the allowable egoism of the occupant of
a sick bed, upon his "regal solitude," and goes on to show "how
convalescence shrinks a man back to his primitive state." The essay
was inspired by that ill-health which led to Lamb's retirement from
the India House in 1825. At the close he indulged his pen in his
conversational fondness for a pun:

In this flat swamp of convalescence, left by the ebb of
sickness, yet far enough removed from the terra firma of
established health, your note, dear Editor, reached me,
requesting--an article. _In articulo mortis_, thought I; but
it is something hard--and the quibble, wretched as it was,
relieved me.

In the "Sanity of True Genius" Elia set out to controvert the idea
expressed by Dryden in his best remembered line--

"Great wits to madness nearly are allied,"

and does so in a most convincing manner if, with him, we understand by
the greatness of wit poetic talent. As he says: "It is impossible for
the mind to conceive of a mad Shakespeare."

The ground of the mistake is, that men, finding in the
raptures of the higher poetry a condition of exaltation, to
which they have no parallel in their own experience, besides
the spurious resemblance of it in dreams and fevers, impute
a state of dreaminess and fever to the poet. But the true
poet dreams being awake. He is not possessed by his subject
but has dominion over it. In the groves of Eden he walks
familiar as in his n