goodness of heart, their capacities of making a joke and of seeing one, and for their abilities, unknown often as the woodland violet, but not the less sweet for obscurity.  As a consequence, his acquaintance is miscellaneous, and he is often seen at other places than rich men’s feasts.  I do believe he is a gainer by reason of his vagrant ways.  He comes in contact with the queer corners and the out-of-the-way places of human life.  He knows more of our common nature, just as the man who walks through a country, and who strikes off the main road now and then to visit a ruin, or a legendary cairn of stones, who drops into village inns, and talks with the people he meets on the road, becomes better acquainted with it than the man who rolls haughtily along the turnpike in a carriage and four.  We lose a great deal by foolish hauteur.  No man is worth much who has not a touch of the vagabond in him.  Could I have visited London thirty years ago, I would rather have spent an hour with Charles Lamb than with any other of its residents.  He was a fine specimen of the vagabond, as I conceive him.  His mind was as full of queer nooks and tortuous passages as any mansion-house of Elizabeth’s day or earlier, where the rooms are cosey, albeit a little low in the roof; where dusty stained lights are falling on old oaken panellings; where every bit of furniture has a reverent flavour of ancientness; where portraits of noble men and women, all dead long ago, are hanging on the walls; and where a black-letter Chaucer with silver clasps is lying open on a seat in the window.  There was nothing modern about him.  The garden of his mind did not flaunt in gay parterres; it resembled those that Cowley and Evelyn delighted in, with clipped trees, and shaven lawns, and stone satyrs, and dark, shadowing yews, and a sun-dial, with a Latin motto sculptured on it, standing at the farther end.  Lamb was the slave of quip and whimsey; he stuttered out puns to the detriment of all serious and improving conversation, and twice or so in the year he was overtaken in liquor.  Well, in spite of these things, perhaps on account of these things, I love his memory.  For love and charity ripened in that nature as peaches ripen on the wall that fronts the sun.  Although he did not blow his trumpet in the corners of the streets, he was tried as few men are, and fell not.  He jested, that he might not weep.  He wore a martyr’s heart beneath his suit of motley.  And only years after his death, when to admiration or censure he was alike insensible, did the world know his story and that of his sister Mary.

Ah, me! what a world this was to live in two or three centuries ago, when it was getting itself discovered—­when the sunset gave up America, when a steel hand had the spoiling of Mexico and Peru!  Then were the “Arabian Nights” commonplace, enchantments a matter of course, and romance the most ordinary thing in the world.  Then man was courting Nature; now he has married her.  Every mystery is dissipated.