Still, those who, however unnecessarily (for no one surely is going to deny it save in a mood of paradox or of monomania), insist that style must be the body of thought—nay, that this body itself must think (in Donne’s phrase), and not merely live, will find no difficulty in claiming Lamb as theirs. Nothing of the kind is more curious than the fact that, strongly marked as are his peculiarities and much as he may himself have imitated, he is not imitable; nobody has ever, except in the minutest shreds—rather actually torn off from his motley than reproducing it—written in Lamb’s style save Lamb. And accordingly no one (though not a few have tried) has ever criticised like Lamb. It is very easy to be capricious, fantastic, fastidious—as easy as to wear yellow stockings and go cross-gartered, and as effective. To Lamb’s critical attitude there go in the first place that love for the book which has been spoken of; then that faculty of sound, almost common-sense, “taste” which is shown in the early letters to Coleridge and Southey; then the reading of years and decades; and, lastly, the _je ne sais quoi_ that “fondoos” the other things, as the old Oxford story has it—a story to be constantly borne in mind by the critic and the historian of criticism.[468] Even the other ingredients are not too common, especially in conjunction: the _je ne sais quoi_ itself is here, and nowhere else. [Sidenote: _Leigh Hunt: his somewhat inferior position._] Leigh Hunt[469] claims less space from us than either of his friends Hazlitt and Lamb. This is not because he is an inconsiderable critic, for he is by no means this. As has been said, he has the immense and surprising credit of having first discovered the greatness of the tragic part of Middleton’s _Changeling_, as an individual exploit, and in more general ways he has that, which Macaulay duly recognised in a well-known passage,[470] of being perhaps more _catholic_ in his tastes as regards English Literature than any critic up to his time. He has left a very large range of critical performance, which is very rarely without taste, acuteness, and felicity of expression; and he has, as against both the greater critics just named, the very great advantage of possessing a competent knowledge of at least one modern literature[471] besides his own, and some glimmerings of others. He has the further deserts of being almost always readable, of diffusing a pleasant sunny atmosphere, and of doing very much to keep up the literary side of that periodical production which, for good or for evil, was, with the novel, the great literary feature of the nineteenth century. These are not small merits: and while they might seem greater if they were not thrown somewhat into the shade by the superior eminence of Coleridge and Hazlitt, and the superior attractiveness of Lamb, they retain, even in the vicinity of these, claims to full acknowledgment. [Sidenote: _Reasons for it._]