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'I am out of the world of readers,' Lamb wrote to Coleridge, 'I hate all that do read, for they read nothing but reviews and new books. I gather myself up into the old things.' 'I am jealous for the actors who pleased my youth,' he says elsewhere. And again: 'For me, I do not know whether a constitutional imbecility does not incline me too obstinately to cling to the remembrances of childhood; in an inverted ratio to the usual sentiment of mankind, nothing that I have been engaged in since seems of any value or importance compared to the colours which imagination gave to everything then.' In Lamb this love of old things, this willing recurrence to childhood, was the form in which imagination came to him. He is the grown-up child of letters, and he preserves all through his life that child's attitude of wonder, before 'this good world, which he knows—which was created so lovely, beyond his deservings.' He loves the old, the accustomed, the things that people have had about them since they could remember. 'I am in love,' he says in the most profoundly serious of his essays, 'with this green earth; the face of town and country; and the sweet security of streets.' He was a man to whom mere living had zest enough to make up for everything that was contrary in the world. His life was tragic, but not unhappy. Happiness came to him out of the little things that meant nothing to others, or were not so much as seen by them. He had a genius for living, and his genius for writing was only a part of it, the part which he left to others to remember him by.

Lamb's religion, says Pater, was 'the religion of men of letters, religion as understood by the soberer men of letters in the last century'; and Hood says of him: 'As he was in spirit an Old Author, so was he in faith an Ancient Christian.' He himself tells Coleridge that he has 'a taste for religion rather than a strong religious habit,' and, later in life, writes to a friend: 'Much of my seriousness has gone off.' On this, as on other subjects, he grew shyer, withdrew more into himself; but to me it seems that a mood of religion was permanent with him. 'Such religion as I have,' he said, 'has always acted on me more by way of sentiment than argumentative process'; and we find him preferring churches when they are empty, as many really religious people have done. To Lamb religion was a part of human feeling, or a kindly shadow over it. He would have thrust his way into no mysteries. And it was not lightly, or with anything but a strange-complexioned kind of gratitude, that he asked: '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 fire-side conversations, and innocent vanities, and jests, and irony itself—do these things go out with life?'

It was what I call Lamb's religion that helped him to enjoy life so humbly, heartily, and delicately, and to give to others the sensation of all that is most enjoyable in the things about us. It may be said of him, as he says of the fox in the fable: 'He was an adept in that species of moral alchemy, which turns everything into gold.' And this moral alchemy of his was no reasoned and arguable optimism, but a 'spirit of youth in everything,' an irrational, casuistical, 'matter-of-lie' persistence in the face of all logic, experience, and sober judgment; an upsetting of truth grown tedious and custom gone stale. And for a truth of the letter it substituted a new, valiant truth of the spirit; for dead things, living ideas; and gave birth to the most religious sentiment of which man is capable: grateful joy.

Among the innumerable objects and occasions of joy which Lamb found laid out before him, at the world's feast, books were certainly one of the most precious, and after books came pictures. 'What any man can write, surely I may read!' he says to Wordsworth, of Caryl on Job, six folios. 'I like books about books,' he confesses, the test of the book-lover. 'I love,' he says, 'to lose myself in other men's minds. When I am not walking, I am reading; I cannot sit and think. Books think for me.' He was the finest of all readers, far more instant than Coleridge; not to be taken unawares by a Blake ('I must look on him as one of the most extraordinary persons of the age,' he says of him, on but a slight and partial acquaintance), or by Wordsworth when the Lyrical Ballads are confusing all judgments, and he can pick out at sight 'She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways' as 'the best piece in it,' and can define precisely the defect of much of the book, in one of those incomparable letters of escape, to Manning: 'It is full of original thought, but it does not often make you laugh or cry. It too artfully aims at simplicity of expression.' I choose these instances because the final test of a critic is in his reception of contemporary work; and Lamb must have found it much easier to be right, before every one else, about Webster, and Ford, and Cyril Tourneur, than to be the accurate critic that he was of Coleridge, at the very time when he was under the 'whiff and wind' of Coleridge's influence. And in writing of pictures, though his knowledge is not so great nor his instinct so wholly 'according to knowledge,' he can write as no one has ever written in praise of Titian (so that his very finest sentence describes a picture of Titian) and can instantly detect and minutely expose the swollen contemporary delusion of a would-be Michael Angelo, the portentous Martin.

Then there were the theatres, which Lamb loved next to books. There has been no criticism of acting in English like Lamb's, so fundamental, so intimate and elucidating. His style becomes quintessential when he speaks of the stage, as in that tiny masterpiece, On the Acting of Munden, which ends the book of Elia, with its great close, the Beethoven soft wondering close, after all the surges: 'He understands a leg of mutton in its quiddity. He stands wondering, amid the commonplace materials of life, like primeval man with the sun and stars about him.' He is equally certain of Shakespeare, of Congreve, and of Miss Kelly. When he defines the actors, his pen seems to be plucked by the very wires that work the puppets. And it is not merely because he was in love with Miss Kelly that he can write of her acting like this, in words that might apply with something of truth to himself. He has been saying of Mrs. Jordan, that 'she seemed one whom care could not come near; a privileged being, sent to teach mankind what it most wants, joyousness.' Then he goes on: 'This latter lady's is the joy of a freed spirit, escaping from care, as a bird that had been limed; her smiles, if I may use the expression, seemed saved out of the fire, relics which a good and innocent heart had snatched up as most portable; her contents are visitors, not inmates: she can lay them by altogether; and when she does so, I am not sure that she is not greatest.' Is not this, with all its precise good sense, the rarest poetry of prose, a poetry made up of no poetical epithets, no fanciful similes, but 'of imagination all compact,' poetry in substance?

Then there was London. In Lamb London found its one poet. 'The earth, and sea, and sky (when all is said),' he admitted, 'is but as a house to live in'; and, 'separate from the pleasure of your company,' he assured Wordsworth, 'I don't much care if I never see a mountain in my life. I have passed all my days in London, until I have formed as many and intense local attachments as any of your mountaineers can have done with dead nature. The lighted shops of the Strand and Fleet Street, the innumerable trades, tradesmen, and customers, coaches, waggons, play-houses, all the bustle and wickedness round about Covent Garden, the very women of the town, the watchmen, drunken scenes, rattles—life awake, if you awake, at all hours of the night, the impossibility of being dull in Fleet Street, the crowds, the very dirt and mud, the sun shining upon houses and pavements, the print shops, the old bookstalls, parsons cheapening books, coffee-houses, steams of soups from kitchens, the pantomime, London itself a pantomime and a masquerade—all these things work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me. The wonder of these sights impels me into night-walks about her crowded streets, and I often shed tears in the motley Strand from fulness of joy at so much life.' There, surely, is the poem of London, and it has almost more than the rapture, in its lover's catalogue, of Walt Whitman's poems of America. Almost to the end, he could say (as he does again to Wordsworth, not long before his death), 'London streets and faces cheer me inexpressibly, though of the latter not one known one were remaining.' He traces the changes in streets, their distress or disappearance, as he traces the dwindling of his friends, 'the very streets, he says,' writes Mary, 'altering every day.' London was to him the new, better Eden. 'A garden was the primitive prison till man with Promethean felicity and boldness sinned himself out of it. Thence followed Babylon, Nineveh, Venice, London, haberdashers, goldsmiths, taverns, play-houses, satires, epigrams, puns—these all came in on the town part, and thither side of innocence.' To love London so was part of his human love, and in his praise of streets he has done as much for the creation and perpetuating of joy as Wordsworth ('by whose system,' Mary Lamb conjectured, 'it was doubtful whether a liver in towns had a soul to be saved') has done by his praise of flowers and hills.

And yet, for all his 'disparagement of heath and highlands,' as he confessed to Scott, Lamb was as instant and unerring in his appreciation of natural things, once brought before them, as he was in his appreciation of the things of art and the mind and man's making. He was a great walker, and sighs once, before his release from the desk: 'I wish I were a caravan driver or a penny post man, to earn my bread in air and sunshine.' We have seen what he wrote to Wordsworth about his mountains, before he had seen them. This is what he writes of them to Manning, after he has seen them: 'Such an impression I never received from objects of sight before, nor do I suppose I can ever again. … In fine, I have satisfied myself that there is such a thing as that which tourists call romantic, which I very much suspected before.' And to Coleridge he writes: 'I feel that I shall remember your mountains to the last day I live. They haunt me perpetually.' All this Lamb saw and felt, because no beautiful thing could ever appeal to him in vain. But he wrote of it only in his letters, which were all of himself; because he put into his published writings only the best or the rarest or the accustomed and familiar part of himself, the part which he knew by heart.