of brown sugar, while they are posthumously amorous of vinegar; why the sour mango and the sweet jam, by turns, court and are accepted by the compilable mutton hash—­she not yet decidedly declaring for either.  We are as yet but in the empirical stage of cookery.

* * * * *

So to see Lear acted—­to see an old man tottering about the stage with a walking-stick, turned out of doors by his daughters on a rainy night, has nothing in it but what is painful and disgusting.  We want to take him into shelter and relieve him.  That is all the feeling which the acting of Lear ever produced on me.  But the Lear of Shakespeare cannot be acted.  The contemptible machinery by which they mimic the storm which he goes out in, is not more inadequate to represent the horrors of the real elements, than any actor can be to represent Lear:  they might more easily propose to personate the Satan of Milton upon a stage, or one of Michael Angelo’s terrible figures.  The greatness of Lear is not in corporal dimension but in intellectual:  the explosions of his passions are terrible as a volcano; they are storms turning up and disclosing to the bottom that sea, his mind, with all its vast riches.  It is his mind which is laid bare.  This case of flesh and blood seems too insignificant to be thought on; even as he himself neglects it.  On the stage we see nothing but corporal infirmities and weakness, the impotence of rage:  while we read it, we see not Lear, but we are Lear—­we are in his mind, we are sustained by a grandeur which baffles the malice of daughters and storms; in the aberrations of his reason, we discover a mighty irregular power of reasoning, immethodized from the ordinary purposes of life, but exerting its powers, as the wind bloweth where it listeth, at will upon the corruptions and abuses of mankind.  What have looks or tones to do with that sublime identification of his age with that of the heavens themselves, when in his reproaches to them for conniving at the injustice of his children, he reminds them that “they themselves are old”?  What gesture shall we appropriate to this?  What has the voice or the eye to do with such things?

                  From the olden time
    Of Authorship thy Patent should be dated,
    And thou with Marvell, Browne, and Burton mated.

Thus did Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet, close a sonnet which he addressed to Elia, and there is keen criticism in the few words.  With the three writers mentioned Lamb was in rarest sympathy; many are the references to them in his books and in his letters.  With Andrew Marvell he shows his kinship in his verse, with the authors of “The Religio Medici” and of “The Anatomy of Melancholy,” in diverse ways in his prose.  Now fanciful and euphemistic with these, he is, as soon as occasion calls for plainer statement, clear and simple in expression.  As one critic has put it, he was so steeped in the literature