Large, sounding words, unless embodying great thoughts (as in the case of Lear), he did not treasure up or repeat. He was an admirer of what was high and good, of what was delicate (especially); but he delighted most to saunter along the humbler regions, where kindness of heart and geniality of humor made the way pleasant. His intellect was very quick, piercing into the recondite meaning of things in a moment. His own sentences were compressed and full of meaning; his opinions independent and decisive; no qualifying or doubting. His descriptions were not highly colored; but, as it were, sharply cut, like a piece of marble, rather than like a picture. He liked and encouraged friendly discussion; but he hated contentious argument, which leads to quarrel rather than to truth.
There was an utter want of parade in everything he said and did, in everything about him and his home. The only ornaments on his walls were a few engravings in black frames: one after Leonardo da Vinci; one after Titian; and four, I think, by Hogarth, about whom he has written so well. Images of quaint beauty, and all gentle, simple things (things without pretension) pleased him to the fullest extent; perhaps a little beyond their strict merit. I have heard him express admiration for Leonardo da Vinci that he did not accord to Raffaelle. Raffaelle was too ostentatious of meaning; his merits were too obvious,—too much thrust upon the understanding; not retired nor involved, so as to need discovery or solution. He preferred even Titian (whose meaning is generally obvious enough) to Raffaelle; but Leonardo was above both. Without doubt, Lamb's taste on several matters was peculiar; for instance, there were a few obsolete words, such as arride, agnize, burgeon, &c., which he fancied, and chose to rescue from oblivion. Then he did not care for music. I never heard a song in his house, nor any conversation on the subject of melody or harmony, "I have no ear," he says; yet the sentiment, apart from the science of music, gave him great pleasure. He reverenced the fine organ playing of Mr. Novello, and admired the soaring singing of his daughter,— "the tuneful daughter of a tuneful sire;" but he resented the misapplication of the theatres to sacred music. He thought this a profanation of the good old original secular purposes of a playhouse.
As a comprehension of all delights he loved London; with its bustle and its living throngs of men and women; its shops, its turns and windings; the cries and noises of trade and life; beyond all other things. He liked also old buildings and out-of-the-way places; colleges; solemn churchyards, round which the murmuring thousands floated unheeding. In particular he was fond of visiting, in his short vacations, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Although (he writes) "Mine have been anything but studious hours," he professes to have received great solace from those "repositories of 'mouldering' learning." "What a place to be in is an old library!" he exclaims, "where the souls of the old writers seem reposing, as in some dormitory or middle state." The odor of the "moth- scented" coverings of the old books is "as fragrant as the blooms of the tree of knowledge which grew in the happy orchard."
An ancient manor-house, that Vanbrugh might have built, dwelt like a picture in his memory. "Nothing fills a child's mind like an old mansion," he says. Yet he could feel unaffectedly the simplicity and beauty of a country life. The heartiness of country people went to his heart direct, and remained there forever. The Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of poetasters and self-glorifying artists.
He never spoke disparagingly of any person, nor overpraised any one. When it was proposed to erect a statue of Clarkson, during his life, he objected to it: "We should be modest," he says, "for a modest man." He was himself eminently modest; he never put himself forward: he was always sought. He had much to say on many subjects, and he was repeatedly pressed 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 liking for unpretending men, who would come and gossip with him in a friendly, companionable way, or who liked to talk about old authors or old books. In his love of books he was very catholic. "Shaftesbury is not too genteel, nor Jonathan Wild too low. But for books which are no books," such as "scientific treatises, and the histories of Hume, Smollett, and Gibbon," &c., he confesses that he becomes splenetic when he sees them perched up on shelves, "like false saints, who have usurped the true shrines" of the legitimate occupants. He loved old books and authors, indeed, beyond most other things. He used to say (with Shakespeare), "The Heavens themselves are old." He would rather have acquired an ancient forgotten volume than a modern one, at an equal price; the very circumstance of its having been neglected and cast disdainfully into the refuse basket of a bookstall gave it value in his eyes. He bought it, and rejoiced in being able thus to remedy the injustice of fortune.
He liked best those who had not thriven with posterity: his reverence for Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, can only be explained in this way. It must not be forgotten that his pity or generosity towards neglected authors extended also to all whom the goddess of Good Fortune had slighted. In this list were included all who had suffered in purse or in repute. He was ready to defend man or beast, whenever unjustly attacked. I remember that, at one of the monthly magazine dinners, when John Wilkes was too roughly handled, Lamb quoted the story (not generally known) of his replying, when the blackbirds were reported to have stolen all his cherries, "Poor birds, they are welcome." He said that those impulsive words showed the inner nature of the man more truly than all his political speeches.
Lamb's charity extended to all things. I never heard him speak spitefully of any author. He thought that every one should have a clear stage, unobstructed. His heart, young at all times, never grew hard or callous during life. There was always in it a tender spot, which Time was unable to touch. He gave away greatly, when the amount of his means are taken into consideration; he gave away money—even annuities, I believe—to old impoverished friends whose wants were known to him. I remember that once, when we were sauntering together on Pentonville Hill, and he noticed great depression in me, which he attributed to want of money, he said, suddenly, in his stammering way, "My dear boy, I—I have a quantity of useless things. I have now—in my desk, a—a hundred pounds—that I don't—don't know what to do with. Take it." I was much touched; but I assured him that my depression did not arise from want of money.
He was very home-loving; he loved London as the best of places; he loved his home as the dearest spot in London: it was the inmost heart of the sanctuary. Whilst at home he had no curiosity for what passed beyond his own territory. His eyes were never truant; no one ever saw him peering out of window, examining the crowds flowing by; no one ever surprised him gazing on vacancy. "I lose myself," he says, "in other men's minds. When I am not walking I am reading; I cannot sit and think; books think for me." If it was not the time for his pipe, it was always the time for an old play, or for a talk with friends. In the midst of this society his own mind grew green again and blossomed; or, as he would have said, "burgeoned."