Indeed, it is the most elegant spot in the metropolis.  What a transition for a countryman visiting London for the first time—­the passing from the crowded Strand or Fleet Street, by unexpected avenues, into its magnificent ample squares, its classic green recesses! what a cheerful, liberal look hath that portion of it, which, from three sides, overlooks the greater garden, that goodly pile

          “Of building strong, albeit of Paper hight,”

confronting, with massy contrast, the lighter, older, more fantastically shrouded one named of Harcourt, with the cheerful Crown Office Row (place of my kindly engendure) right opposite the stately stream, which washes the garden-foot with her yet scarcely trade-polluted waters, and seems but just weaned from her Twickenham Naiades! a man would give something to have been born in such places.  What a collegiate aspect has that fine Elizabethan hall, where the fountain plays, which I have made to rise and fall, how many times! to the astoundment of the young urchins, my contemporaries, who, not being able to guess at its recondite machinery, were almost tempted to hail the wondrous work as magic!  What an antique air had the now almost effaced sun-dials with their moral inscriptions, seeming co-evals with that Time which they measured, and to take their revelations of its flight immediately from heaven, holding correspondence with the fountain of light!  How would the dark line steal imperceptibly on, watched by the eye of childhood, eager to detect its movement, never catched, nice as an evanescent cloud, or the first arrests of sleep!

          “Ah! yet doth beauty like a dial-hand
          Steal from his figure, and no pace perceived!”

What a dead thing is a clock, with its ponderous embowelments of lead and brass, its pert or solemn dullness of communication, compared with the simple altar-like structure and silent heart-language of the old dial!  It stood as the garden god of Christian gardens.  Why is it almost everywhere vanished?

In this essay, too, we have a happy sentence where, noting an error into which his memory had betrayed him, Elia wrote of his own narratives:  “They are, in truth, but shadows of fact—­verisimilitudes, not verities—­or sitting but upon the remote edges and outskirts of history.”

Dealing with “Grace Before Meat” Elia takes up an unconventional position and defends it with spirit.  It is something of an impertinence to offer up thanks before an orgy of superfluous luxuries, a “grace” is only fitting for a poor man sitting down before the necessaries for which he may well feel thankful.  Even such a theme Lamb finds a fruitful occasion for pertinent literary illustration and criticism, contrasting—­from Milton’s “Paradise Lost”—­the feast proffered by the Tempter to Christ in the wilderness with “the temperate dreams of the divine Hungerer.”