boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a
measure poisoned, "nothing comes to him not spoiled by the
sophisticating medium of moral uses." Incidentally too, Elia informs
us that the school-master

is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you. One
of these professors, upon my complaining that these little
sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I
was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to
instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his
seminary were taught to compose English themes. The jests of
a school-master are coarse or thin.

The next essay--the only one in "The Essays of Elia" volume which had
not appeared in the "London Magazine"--is a pretty bit about
"Valentine's Day." This is followed by an inquiry into the existence
of "Imperfect Sympathies," the writer declaring that he had been
trying all his life--without success--to like Scotsmen, and that he
had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews. The Scotsmen are too
precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those
to which alone they will attend. This would of itself be sufficient
to establish the "imperfect sympathy," for in another connection Lamb
had declared his preference for "a matter of lie man."

"Witches and Other Night Fears" is an examination, in which
whimsicality is blent with deep seriousness, of the night terrors of
imaginative childhood; Elia showed how a picture in an old time Bible
history had shaped his fears and made his nights hideous for several
years of his early childhood, though he holds that "It is not book, or
picture, or the stories of foolish servants, which create these