Our ancestors were nice in their method of sacrificing these tender victims.  We read of pigs whipt to death with something of a shock, as we hear of any other obsolete custom.  The age of discipline is gone by, or it would be curious to inquire (in a philosophical light merely) what effect this process might have towards intenerating and dulcifying a substance, naturally so mild and dulcet as the flesh of young pigs.  It looks like refining a violet.  Yet we should be cautious, while we condemn the inhumanity, how we censure the wisdom of the practice.  It might impart a gusto.

The subject Charles Lamb professed to take from a Chinese manuscript of his friend Manning’s, and there have not been wanting critics who have sought for literary germs from which this essay might have sprung.  Such will find in the seventeenth-century “Letters writ by a Turkish Spy” the origin of roasted meat referred to the days of sacrifice when one of the priests touching a burning beast hurt his fingers and applied them to his mouth—­with precisely the same sequel which followed on Bo-bo’s escapade.

“A Bachelor’s Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People” is a delicate—­perhaps partly ironical—­description of a bachelor’s objections to his married friends flaunting their happiness in his face.  In the last three of the essays we have Lamb as critic of the stage—­partly, as in the Dramatic Specimens, of its literature, “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century;” and partly on its actors, “On some of the Old Actors” and “On the Acting of Munden.”  Here again we have proofs of his instinctive critical power, his finely perfected method of expressing his appreciation of men and books.

The “Last Essays of Elia,” published the year before Lamb’s death, open with a “Character of the late Elia”—­an admirable piece of self-portraiture in which Lamb hit off with great felicity some of his own characteristics, physical and intellectual.  In the first of the essays, “Blakesmoor in H——­shire,” the author let his memory and fancy play about the old house, lately razed, in which his grandmother Field had held sway as housekeeper, in which as child he had passed many happy holidays.  Its tapestries, its haunted room, its “tattered and diminished ’Scutcheon,” its Justice Hall, its “costly fruit garden, with its sun-baked southern wall,” its “noble Marble Hall, with its Mosaic pavements, and its Twelve Caesars—­stately busts in marble—­ranged round,” each of these recalled by memory suggests some deep thought or some pleasant turn.  The opening passage at once sets the note of the whole, and may be taken as a representation of Lamb’s contemplative mood: