to say this, before he consented to do so. He was almost teased into
writing the Elia Essays. These and all his other writings are brief and to
the point. He did not exhale in words. It was said that Coleridge's talk
was worth so many guineas a sheet. Charles Lamb talked but sparingly. He
put forth only so much as had complete flavor. I know that high pay and
frequent importunity failed to induce him to squander his strength in
careless essays: he waited until he could give them their full share of
meaning and humor.

When I speak of his extreme liking for London, it must not be supposed
that he was insensible to great scenery. After his only visit to the Lake
country, and beholding Skiddaw, he writes back to his host, "O! its fine
black head, and the bleak air at the top of it, with a prospect of
mountains all about making you giddy. It was a day that will stand out
like a mountain in my life;" adding, however, "Fleet Street and the Strand
are better places to live in, for good and all. I could not _live_ in
Skiddaw. I could spend there two or three years; but I must have a
prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope
and pine away." He loved even its smoke, and asserted that it suited his
vision. A short time previously he had, in a touching letter to Wordsworth
(1801), enumerated the objects that he liked so much in London. "These
things," he writes, "work themselves into my mind: the rooms where I was
born; a bookcase that has followed me about like a faithful dog (only
exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved; old chairs; old tables;
squares where I have sunned myself; my old school: these are my
mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you;
I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with
anything."

Besides his native London, "the centre of busy interests," he had great