These lines well describe the modest and delicate beauties of Mr. Lamb’s writings, contrasted with the lofty and vain-glorious pretensions of some of his contemporaries.  This gentleman is not one of those who pay all their homage to the prevailing idol:  he thinks that

  “New-born gauds are made and moulded of things past.”

nor does he

  “Give to dust that is a little gilt
  More laud than gilt o’er-dusted.”

His convictions “do not in broad rumour lie,” nor are they “set off to the world in the glistering foil” of fashion; but “live and breathe aloft in those pure eyes, and perfect judgment of all-seeing time.”  Mr. Lamb rather affects and is tenacious of the obscure and remote:  of that which rests on its own intrinsic and silent merit; which scorns all alliance, or even the suspicion of owing any thing to noisy clamour, to the glare of circumstances.  There is a fine tone of chiaro-scuro, a moral perspective in his writings.  He delights to dwell on that which is fresh to the eye of memory; he yearns after and covets what soothes the frailty of human nature.  That touches him most nearly which is withdrawn to a certain distance, which verges on the borders of oblivion:—­that piques and provokes his fancy most, which is hid from a superficial glance.  That which, though gone by, is still remembered, is in his view more genuine, and has given more “vital signs that it will live,” than a thing of yesterday, that may be forgotten to-morrow.  Death has in this sense the spirit of life in it; and the shadowy has to our author something substantial in it.  Ideas savour most of reality in his mind; or rather his imagination loiters on the edge of each, and a page of his writings recals to our fancy the stranger on the grate, fluttering in its dusky tensity, with its idle superstition and hospitable welcome!

Mr. Lamb has a distaste to new faces, to new books, to new buildings, to new customs.  He is shy of all imposing appearances, of all assumptions of self-importance, of all adventitious ornaments, of all mechanical advantages, even to a nervous excess.  It is not merely that he does not rely upon, or ordinarily avail himself of them; he holds them in abhorrence, he utterly abjures and discards them, and places a great gulph between him and them.  He disdains all the vulgar artifices of authorship, all the cant of criticism, and helps to notoriety.  He has no grand swelling theories to attract the visionary and the enthusiast, no passing topics to allure the thoughtless and the vain.  He evades the present, he mocks the future.  His affections revert to, and settle on the past, but then, even this must have something personal and local in it to interest him deeply and thoroughly; he pitches his tent in the suburbs of existing manners; brings down the account of character to the few straggling remains of the last generation; seldom ventures beyond the bills of mortality, and occupies that nice point