of separate comment.  Indeed, for variety in unity there are few books to compare with our Elia.  In the opening essay—­the first of the series to appear in the “London Magazine,” the one to stand in the forefront of the volume—­Lamb blends reminiscences with fancy, as he continued to do frequently throughout the series, in a way that is as suggestive to the seeker after autobiographical data as it is engaging to the reader in search of nothing further than the rich delight which comes of passing time with a literary gem.  Lamb pictures “The South Sea House” as it was when he knew it thirty years earlier—­he speaks of it as forty years.  There is a presentation of the old place, fallen more or less completely upon days of desuetude, with some wonderfully-limned portraits of the officials.  Here is the deputy-cashier, Thomas Tame: 

He had the air and stoop of a nobleman.  You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster Hall.  By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors.  While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy.  The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you.  His intellect was of the shallowest order.  It did not reach to a saw or a proverb.  His mind was in its original state of white paper.  A sucking babe might have posed him.  What was it then?  Was he rich!  Alas, no!  Thomas Tame was very poor.  Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentle folks, when I fear all was not well at all times within.  She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood.  She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood—­much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day—­to the illustrious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater.  This was the secret of Thomas’s stoop.  This was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station!  This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments, and it was worth them all together.  You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et solamen.

Then at the close Elia says, “Reader, what if I have been playing with thee all this while—­peradventure the very names, which I have summoned up before thee, are fantastic—­insubstantial—­like Henry Pimpernel and old John Naps of Greece; be satisfied that something answering to them has had a being.  Their importance is from the past.”  The names may have been mostly fantastic—­in