Mr. Birrell is quite as selfish in his felicity as Mr. Saintsbury,
and perfectly frank in acknowledging it. He dwells rapturously over
certain well-loved pages of "Pride and Prejudice" and "Mansfield
Park," and then deliberately adds, "When an admirer of Miss Austen
reads these familiar passages, the smile of satisfaction, betraying
the deep inward peace they never fail to beget, widens like 'a circle
in the water,' as he remembers (and he is always careful to remember)
how his dearest friend, who has been so successful in life, can no
more read Miss Austen than he can read the Moabitish stone." The same
peculiarity is noticeable in the more ardent lovers of Charles Lamb.
They seem to want him all to themselves, look askance upon any
fellow-being who ventures to assert a modest preference for their
idol, and brighten visibly when some ponderous critic declares the
Letters to be sad stuff and not worth half the exasperating nonsense
talked about them. Yet Lamb flung his good things to the wind with
characteristic prodigality, little recking by whom or in what spirit
they were received. How many witticisms, I wonder, were roared into
the deaf ears of old Thomas Westwood, who heard them not, alas! but
who laughed all the same, out of pure sociability, and with a
pleasant sense that something funny had been said! And what of that
ill-fated pun which Lamb, in a moment of deplorable abstraction, let
fall at a funeral, to the surprise and consternation of the mourners?
Surely a man who could joke at a funeral never meant his pleasantries
to be hoarded up for the benefit of an initiated few, but would
gladly see them the property of all living men; ay, and of all dead
men, too, were such a distribution possible. "Damn the age! I will
write for antiquity!" he exclaimed with not unnatural heat when the
"Gypsy's Malison" was rejected by the ingenious editors of the
_Gem_, on the ground that it would "shock all mothers"; and even