pre-established harmony between subject and critic. That he could not, on the other hand, like Shelley, is not unsusceptible of explanations by no means wholly identical, though partly, with those which account for Hazlitt’s error. Lamb did not like the word “unearthly” (he somewhere objects to its use) and he did not like the thing unearthliness. The regions where, as Mr Arnold has it, “thin, thin, the pleasant human noises sound,” were not his haunt. Now Blake always has a homely domestic everyday side close to his wildest prophetisings,[465] and Shelley has not. On the other hand, how completely does he grasp even Cervantes in the few _obiter dicta_ to Southey on Aug. 19, 1825,[466] and how instantly he seizes the “charm one cannot explain” in _Rose Aylmer_.[467] And his very last letter concerns a book, and a book on poetry, Phillips’s _Theatrum Poetarum_. [Sidenote: _Uniqueness of Lamb’s critical style_] His love was, as we said, “of the book,” perhaps, rather than, as in Hazlitt’s case, “of literature.” The Advocatus Diaboli may once more suggest that to Lamb the book was a very little too much on a level with the tea-pot and the engraving—that he had a shade in excess of the collector’s feeling about him. But the Court will not call upon the learned gentleman to say anything more on that head. It is time to acknowledge, without reservations or provisos, the unique quality of “Elia’s” critical appreciation. Very much of this quality—if a quality be separable into parts—arises from his extraordinary command of phrase,—the phrase elaborate without affectation, borrowed yet absolutely individual and idiosyncratic, mannered to the _n_th, but never mannerised, in which, though he might not have attained to it without his great seventeenth-century masters, he stands original and alone. In no critic perhaps—not even in Mr Pater—does style count for so much as in Lamb; in none certainly is it more distinctive, and, while never monotonous, more homogeneous, uniform, instantly recognisable and self-bewrayed. The simulative power—almost as of the leaf-insect and suchlike creatures—with which he could imitate styles, is of course most obvious in the _tour de force_ of the Burton counterfeits. But in his best and most characteristic work it is not this which we see, but something much nobler, though closely allied to it. It is not Browne, or Fuller, or Burton, or Glanvill, but something like them, yet different. And though it has more _outré_ presentation in some of his miscellaneous writing than in his criticism, yet it is never absent in the most striking pieces of this, and gives them much of their hold on us. [Sidenote: _and thought._]