proverbial so commonly is it repeated, whose heart-whole devotion to her game will make true Elians whist players when bridge is forgotten.  In “A Chapter on Ears,” Elia expatiates upon his insensibility to music; in “All Fool’s Day” he puts wisdom under motley in a truly Shakespearian fashion, with the fine conclusion, “and take my word for this, reader, and say a fool told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition.”

“The Quakers’ Meeting” is a delicate and impressive verbal representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit.  Those who have never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its significance when they come across a passage such as this: 

More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word having been spoken.  But the mind has been fed.  You go away with a sermon, not made with hands.  You have been in the milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue, that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive.  You have bathed with stillness—­O, when the spirit is sore fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a line of Wordsworth’s far from that poet’s intention:  “Their garb and stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and herd-like—­as in the pasture—­’forty feeding like one.’”

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between “The Old and the New School-Master,” on the way in which the pedagogue is differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his boys but from his fellows generally; he is a man for whom life is in a measure poisoned, “nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses.”  Incidentally too, Elia informs us that the school-master

is so used to teaching that he wants to be teaching you.  One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were anything but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.  The jests of a school-master are coarse or thin.

The next essay—­the only one in “The Essays of Elia” volume which had not appeared in the “London Magazine”—­is a pretty bit about “Valentine’s Day.”  This is followed by an inquiry into the existence of “Imperfect Sympathies,” the writer declaring that he had been trying all his life—­without success—­to like Scotsmen, and that he had the same imperfect sympathy with Jews.  The Scotsmen are too precise, too matter of fact at once in their own statements and those to which alone they will attend.  This would of itself be sufficient to establish the “imperfect sympathy,” for in another connection Lamb had declared his preference for “a matter of lie man.”