The man would be a boy again,
And be a father too!”
* * * * *
And so I laughed,—my laughter woke
The household with its noise,—
And wrote my dream, when morning broke,
To please the grey-haired boys.
—“We,” said our host, as he closed the book and laid it aside, “are like that: we would eliminate most of Elia and have our Elia too.”
“Yes,” said W. “Exactly. We want them all and we value them the more as we grow older and they grow truer and better. For that is Lamb’s way. He sat down—often in his employers’ time—to amuse the readers of a new magazine and earn a few of those extra guineas which made it possible to write ‘Old China,’ and behold he was shedding radiance on almost every fact of life, no matter how spiritually recondite or remote from his own practical experience. No one can rise from Elia without being deepened and enriched; and no one having read Elia can ever say either off-hand or after a year’s thought which one essay he would retain to the loss of all the others.”
B. hitherto had been a silent listener. Here he spoke, and, as so often, said the final thing. “Yes,” he said, “it is vain (but good sport) to take any one of the essays and argue that it is the best. Just as the best thing in a garden is not any particular flower but the scent of all the flowers that are there, so the best of Lamb is not any single essay but the fragrance of them all. It is for this that those gentle paths have been trodden by so much good company.