will be disappointed with him, at any rate partially. You will have
expected more joy in him than you have received. I have referred in
a previous chapter to the feeling of disappointment which often comes
from first contacts with the classics. The neophyte is apt to find
them--I may as well out with the word--dull. You may have found Lamb
less diverting, less interesting, than you hoped. You may have had
to whip yourself up again and again to the effort of reading him. In
brief, Lamb has not, for you, justified his terrific reputation. If
a classic is a classic because it gives _pleasure_ to succeeding
generations of the people who are most keenly interested in
literature, and if Lamb frequently strikes you as dull, then evidently
there is something wrong. The difficulty must be fairly fronted,
and the fronting of it brings us to the very core of the business of
actually forming the taste. If your taste were classical you would
discover in Lamb a continual fascination; whereas what you in fact do
discover in Lamb is a not unpleasant flatness, enlivened by a vague
humour and an occasional pathos. You ought, according to theory, to be
enthusiastic; but you are apathetic, or, at best, half-hearted. There
is a gulf. How to cross it?

To cross it needs time and needs trouble. The following considerations
may aid. In the first place, we have to remember that, in coming
into the society of the classics in general and of Charles Lamb in
particular, we are coming into the society of a mental superior. What
happens usually in such a case? We can judge by recalling what happens
when we are in the society of a mental inferior. We say things of
which he misses the import; we joke, and he does not smile; what makes
him laugh loudly seems to us horseplay or childish; he is blind to
beauties which ravish us; he is ecstatic over what strikes us as
crude; and his profound truths are for us trite commonplaces. His