For the first day or two I felt stunned, overwhelmed.  I could only apprehend my felicity; I was too confused to taste it sincerely.  I wandered about, thinking I was happy and knowing that I was not.  I was in the condition of a prisoner in the old Bastile, suddenly let loose after a forty years’ confinement.  I could scarce trust myself with myself.  It was like passing out of Time into Eternity—­for it is a sort of Eternity for a man to have all his Time to himself.  It seemed to me that I had more time on my hands than I could ever manage.  From a poor man, poor in Time, I was suddenly lifted up into a vast revenue; I could see no end of my possessions; I wanted some steward, or judicious bailiff, to manage my estates in Time for me.  And here let me caution persons grown old in active business, not lightly, nor without weighing their own resources, to forego their customary employment all at once, for there may be danger in it.  I feel it by myself, but I know that my resources are sufficient; and now that those first giddy raptures have subsided, I have a quiet home-feeling of the blessedness of my condition.  I am in no hurry.  Having all holidays, I am as though I had none.  If Time hung heavy upon me I could walk it away; but I do not walk all day long, as I used to do in those old transient holidays, thirty miles a day, to make the most of them.  If Time were troublesome, I could read it away, but I do not read in that violent measure, with which, having no Time my own but candlelight Time, I used to weary out my head and eyesight in bygone winters.  I walk, read, or scribble (as now) just when the fit seizes me.  I no longer hunt after pleasure; I let it come to me.  I am like the man

    “——­that’s born, and has his years come to him,
    In some green desert.”

“The Genteel Style in Writing” is a delightful enforcement of the “ordinary criticism” that “my Lord Shaftesbury, and Sir William Temple, are models of the genteel style in writing,” though Elia prefers to differentiate them as “the lordly and the gentlemanly.”  The essay is, for the most part, a plea, with illustrations, for a consideration of Sir William Temple as an easy and engaging writer.  “Barbara S——­” is a slight anecdote expanded into a sympathetic little story of a child-actress who, instead of her half-guinea salary, being once handed a guinea in error, virtuously took it back and received the moiety.

“The Tombs in the Abbey” is an indignant protest—­in the form of a letter to Southey—­against the closing of Westminster Abbey and St. Paul’s Cathedral, except during service times, to all but those who could afford to pay for admission; it closes with a touch of humour where Elia suggests that the Abbey had been closed because the statue of Major Andre had been disfigured, and adds:  “The mischief was done about the time that you were a scholar there.  Do you know anything about the unfortunate relic?” Then, in “Amicus Redivivus,” we have an accident to a friend, George Dyer, who had walked absent-mindedly into the New River opposite Lamb’s very door, made to supply matter for treatment in Elia’s pleasantest vein.