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 apple in the dumpling, "how
the devil it got there." His value as a critic is grounded in this
capacity of _naïve_ enjoyment (not of pig, but of literature), of
discerning beauty and making _us_ discern it,--thus adding to the known
treasures and pleasures of mankind.

Suggestions not unprofitable for these later days lurk in these traits
of Elia the student and critic. How worthy the imitation, for instance,