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Everything in the end comes back to a question of taste. Why should one prefer a Corona cigar to a "gasper," a turkey to tripe, a magnum of Mumm to a quart of "swipes," crêpe de Chine and georgette to ninon, Gerald du Maurier to a patter comedian in a suburban pantomime, Titian to Kirchner, or a Savile Row suit to a "reach-me-down"?

It isn't only a question of expense or even of comfort; it's more a question of palate; man needs must love the highest when he sees it. We are most of us too dull of vision and too vitiated by gross familiarity with the commonplace and the vulgar to "see" in the true sense of the word.

There are few benefactors so admirable as those who effect an introduction between our insignificant selves and some genius who has the power to translate us into realms undreamt of in our puny imagination.

Among these geniuses Charles Lamb stands out pre-eminently for one most important reason: he wears no august cloak of ceremony to frighten us away; of all great writers he is the most human and the most lovable. Begin by listening to his preface prefixed to The Last Essay of Elia. There you will hear from his own lips the kind of writing he undertakes to give you—"a sort of unlicked, incondite things—villainously pranked in an affected array of antique modes and phrases."

Of himself we read with a grin of delight that "he never cared for the society of what are called good people" … that "he herded always, while it was possible, with people younger than himself" … that "his manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders."

He is more honest about his weaknesses than any other man of a like fame.

He was certainly not of the "unco' guid," which may have accounted partially for his dislike of Scotsmen, and he affected no indifferences. As a writer he matters just in so far as he felt "the difference of mankind—to an unhealthy excess. I can look with no indifferent eye upon things or persons. Whatever is, is to me a matter of taste or distaste. … I am, in plainer words, a bundle of prejudices … the veriest thrall to sympathies, apathies, antipathies."

The hatred with which he views death shows us how completely a lover of life he was:

"I am not content to pass away 'like a weaver's shuttle.' Those metaphors solace me not, nor sweeten the unpalatable draught of mortality. I care not to be carried with the tide, that smoothly bears human life to eternity, and reluct at the inevitable course of destiny. I am in love with this green earth; the face of town and country; the unspeakable rural solitudes and the sweet security of streets. I would set up my tabernacles here. I am content to stand still, at the age to which I am arrived. … I do not want … to drop, like mellow fruit, as they say, into the grave. Any alteration, on this earth of mine … puzzles and discomposes me … a new state of being staggers me. Sun, and sky, and breeze, and solitary walks, and summer holidays, and the greenness of fields, and the delicious juices of meats and fishes, and society, and the cheerful glass, and candle-light, and fireside conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with Life?"

If you can resist this, which to me is perhaps the most beautiful piece of English prose in existence, you must be a little less than human yourself. So you ask me again why you should read Lamb, and I answer: (1) because he has always something to say and conveys his thought "without smothering it in blankets"; (2) because in antique fancy, quip, oddity, whimsical jest, humour, wit and irony, rare gifts all, he is a supreme master; (3) because his limitations and tragedies were, like ours, many, but his courage in facing them, unlike ours, was cheerful and invincible; the best dramatic and literary critic of his time, he yet had no ear for music ("to read a book, all stops, and be obliged to supply the verbal matter"). He was prevented from becoming an actor by an impediment in his speech; drink went to his head at once and he was fond of it; himself the shining example of the sanity of true genius, his sister killed her father in a mad frenzy; holding women in reverence more than any man, he yet failed to marry the girl of his choice; designed by nature to be a scholar and an Oxford don, he was denied a university education and condemned to thirty-six years of drudgery in a city office … the list of Life's little ironies in his case can be piled mountain high, but the supreme irony is that this sufferer at the hands of the malignant fates is our greatest humorist; and (4) because he takes the homely and familiar for his subjects and sheds fresh and beautiful light upon them, making even the most soured among us reconsider life and its possibilities.