The Garrick Play Notes.
It is natural, though they were written so long afterwards, to take the “Notes on the Garrick Plays” with these other forerunners and suggesters; nor do I think that so much of the “first sprightly running” is lost as has sometimes been thought. How Lamb-like and how pleasant is the phrase on Day’s quaint Parliament of Bees—“the very air seems replete with humming and buzzing melodies.” (Most obvious, of course: only that nobody had met it before!) And the imploration to Novello to set the song from Peele’s Arraignment; and the fine and forcible plea for the minor Elizabethans in the note to The Two Angry Women of Abingdon (a play, by the way, every fresh reading of which makes one more thoroughly agree with Lamb). The fewness and slightness of these notes should not be allowed to obscure their quality.
Miscellaneous Essays.
It was seldom that the bee-like nature of Lamb’s own genius could settle long on a single flower; and his regular “studies” are few, and not always of his very best. The actual state of the paper on The Excursion, after its mangling by Gifford, illustrates the wisdom of that editorial counsel, “Always keep a copy,” which the contributor (alas! we are all guilty) doth so unwisely neglect; and the two best that we have among the miscellaneous essays are those on Wither and on Defoe’s secondary novels. It is difficult to say which is the better: but the singular unlikeness of the two subjects (except that both Wither and Defoe are eminently homely) shows what I presume Canon Ainger meant by the “versatility” of the critic’s genius. Both are admirable, but most characteristically “promiscuous.” The Defoe piece avowedly gives stray notes; but the “Wither,” though it has a beginning, has very little middle, and no end at all.
Elia.
As for Elia itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less—perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the Last Essays Lamb exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular affiche, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”[Sidney”]—the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.”
The later Letters.