of the past that it became natural for him to deal with a theme more or less in the manner in which that theme would have been dealt with by that writer in the past most likely to have made it his own.  This is perhaps slightly exaggerated, but it has something of truth in it.  “For with all his marked individuality of manner there are perhaps few English writers who have written so differently on different themes.”  Placing special emphasis on his favourites—­which besides the three named included Jeremy Taylor, Chapman, and Wither, to say nothing of the whole body of the dramatists of our literary renaissance—­it may be said that his wide reading, his loving study, among the authors of our richest literary periods went far towards forming his style, though it must be remembered—­it cannot be forgotten with a volume of his essays or letters in hand—­that there is always that marked but indescribable “individuality of manner” which pervades the varied whole.

Hazlitt, touching upon the characteristics of Charles Lamb, in the essay in which he—­not very felicitously—­brackets Elia and Geoffrey Crayon in the “Spirit of the Age,” says: 

He is borne along with no pompous paradoxes, shines in no glittering tinsel of a fashionable phraseology; is neither fop nor sophist.  He has none of the turbulence or froth of new-fangled opinions.  His style runs pure and clear, though it may often take an underground course, or be conveyed through old-fashioned conduit pipes.  Mr. Lamb does not court popularity, nor strut in gaudy plumes, but shrinks from every kind of ostentatious and obvious pretension into the retirement of his own mind.

That mind was, as has been said, stored with a wealth from among the best of English literature, and when Lamb expressed himself it was always in pure literary fashion.  He was a bookman writing for those who love things of the mind which can only be passed from generation to generation by means of books.  In this we may recognize the reason—­wholly unconscious to the writer—­for the allusiveness of his style:  it is often that subtle allusiveness which takes for granted as much knowledge in the reader as in the writer of the thing or passage to which allusion is made.  In the sixteenth century such allusiveness was generally fruit of an extensive knowledge of the ancient classics; but though the references differ, the manner is much the same in Charles Lamb as in Jeremy Taylor and Sir Thomas Browne.

Less confident critics than those mentioned at the beginning of this section may yet readily recognize the general individuality of the style in which Elia revealed himself through the medium of his pen.  To his lifelong habit of browsing among old books, his especial fondness for the writers of the sixteenth century, he owed no small part of the richness of his vocabulary, which enabled him frequently to use with fine effect happy old words in place of current makeshifts.  In one of his early letters to Coleridge