It is not enough, however, that a writer should be friends with our appetites. Lamb would never have become the most beloved of English essayists if he had told us only such things as that Coleridge “holds that a man cannot have a pure mind who refuses apple dumplings,” or that he himself, though having lost his taste for “the whole vegetable tribe,” sticks, nevertheless, to asparagus, “which still seems to inspire gentle thoughts.” He was human elsewhere than at the table or beside a bottle. His kindness was higher than gastric. His indulgences seem but a modest disguise for his virtues. His life was a life of industrious self-sacrifice. “I am wedded, Coleridge,” he cried, after the murder of his mother, “to the fortunes of my sister and my poor old father”; and his life with his sister affords one of the supreme examples of fidelity in literary biography. Lamb is eminently the essayist of the affections. The best of his essays are made up of affectionate memories. He seems to steep his very words in some dye of memory and affection that no other writer has discovered. He is one of those rare sentimentalists who speak out of the heart. He has but to write, “Do you remember?” as in _Old China_, and our breasts feel a pang like a home-sick child thinking of the happiness of a distant fireside and a smiling mother that it will see no more. Lamb’s work is full of this sense of separation. He is the painter of “the old familiar faces.” He conjures up a Utopia of the past, in which aunts were kind and Coleridge, the “inspired charity-boy,” was his friend, and every neighbour was a figure as queer as a witch in a fairy-tale. “All, all are gone”--that is his theme. He is the poet of town-bred boyhood. He is a true lover of antiquity, but antiquity means to him, not merely such things as Oxford and a library of old books: it means a small boy sitting in the gallery of the theatre, and the clerks (mostly bachelors) in the shut-up South-Sea House, and the dead pedagogue with uplifted rod in Christ’s Hospital, of whom he wrote: “Poor J. B.! May all his faults be forgiven; and may he be wafted to bliss by little cherub boys, all head and wings, with no _bottoms_ to reproach his sublunary infirmities.” His essays are a jesting elegy on all that venerable and ruined world. He is at once Hamlet and Yorick in his melancholy and his mirth. He has obeyed the injunction: “Let us all praise famous men,” but he has interpreted it in terms of the men who were famous in his own small circle when he was a boy and a poor clerk.