As for _Elia_ itself, it is fortunately too well known to need any analysis or much detailed survey. In the first and more famous collection the literary element is rather a saturation than a separable contingent. Except the “Artificial Comedy” paper, there is none with a definitely literary title or ostensible subject: while this itself starts in the closest connection with the preceding paper on Actors, and is dramatic rather than literary. But the “saturation” is unmistakable. As one turns the beloved and hundred-times-read pages, the constant undercurrent of allusion to books and reading strikes one none the less— perhaps indeed the more—for familiarity, whether it is at some depth, as in places, or whether it bubbles up to and over the surface, as in “Oxford in the Vacation,” and the book-borrowing close of “The Two Races of Men,” and that other close of that “New Year’s Eve” which so unnecessarily fluttered Southey’s orthodoxy, and not a little of “All Fool’s Day”; and in quotations everywhere. But in the _Last Essays_ Lamb exhibits the master-passion much more openly. The “Detached Thoughts on Books and Reading” of course lays all concealment aside,—it is a regular _affiche_, as are also “The Genteel Style in Writing” and (most of all) “On Some Sonnets of Sir Philip Sidney”—the valiant and triumphant sally against Hazlitt—with not a little of “Old China” itself. Everywhere there is evident the abiding, unfailing love of “the book.” [Sidenote: _The later_ Letters.] And if we recur to the _Letters_ we shall find the most abundant proof of this quality. How admirable are those criticisms[459] of the second edition of _Lyrical Ballads_ which, because they are not “neat” praise, roused the poetic irritability, not merely of Wordsworth, whose views respecting the reception of his own verse were always Athanasian, but of Coleridge, who had, at any rate, intervals of self-perception! How sound the judgment of Mrs Barbauld and of Chapman (a pleasing pair) to Coleridge himself on Oct. 23, 1802![460] How sure the touch of the finger on that absurdity in Godwin’s _Chaucer_ which has been so frequently copied since, “the fondness for filling out the picture by supposing what Chaucer did and how he felt”![461] The choicest of his observations are naturally those to Coleridge, almost _passim_: but the vein is so irrepressible that he indulges it even in writing to Wordsworth, though he knew perfectly well that the most favourable reception could only be a mild wonder that people could think or talk of any literature, and especially any poetry, other than “W. W.’s” own. Even his experiences in 1800 could not prevent him from handling[462] the Poems of 1815 with the same “irreverent _parrhesia_” which he uses immediately after[463] also to Southey on _Roderick_ as compared with _Kehama_ and _Madoc_. His famous appreciation of Blake[464] (of whom 'tis pity that he knew no more) is one of the capital examples of