"natural with a self-pleasing quaintness." The phrases are not affected,
but are derived from our ancestors, now gone to another country; they are
brought back from the land of shadows, and made denizens of England, in
modern times. Lamb's studies were the lives and characters of men; his
humors and tragic meditations were generally dug out of his own heart:
there are in them earnestness, and pity, and generosity, and truth; and
there is not a mean or base thought to be found throughout all.

In reading over these old essays, some of them affect me with a grave
pleasure, amounting to pain. I seem to import into them the very feeling
with which he wrote them; his looks and movements are transfigured, and
communicated to me by the poor art of the printer. His voice, so sincere
and earnest, rings in my ear again. He was no Feignwell: apart from his
joke, never was a man so real, and free from pretence. No one, as I
believe, will ever taste the flavor of certain writers as he has done. He
was the last true lover of Antiquity. Although he admitted a few of the
beauties of modern times, yet in his stronger love he soared backwards to
old acclivities, and loved to rest there. His essays, like his sonnets,
are (as I have said) reflections of his own feelings. And so, I think,
should essays generally be. A history or sketch of science, or a logical
effort, may help the reader some way up the ladder of learning; but they
do not link themselves with his affections. I myself prefer the affections
to the sciences. The story of the heart is the deepest of all histories;
and Shakespeare is profounder and longer lived than Maclaurin, or Malthus,
or Ricardo.

Lamb's career throughout his later years was marked by an enlarged
intercourse with society (it had never been confined to persons of his own
way of thinking), by more frequent absences in the country and elsewhere,
and by the reception of a somewhat wider body of acquaintance into his own