Lamb not only made all that world of school and holiday and office a part of antiquity; he also made himself a part of antiquity. He is himself his completest character--the only character, indeed, whom he did not paint in miniature. We know him, as a result of his letters, his essays, and the anecdotes of his friends, more intimately even than we know Dr. Johnson. He has confessed everything except his goodness, and, indeed, did his reputation some harm with his contemporaries by being so public with his shortcomings. He was the enemy of dull priggishness, and would even set up as a buffoon in contrast. He earned the reputation of a drunkard, not entirely deserved, partly by his _Confessions of a Drunkard_, but partly by his habit of bursting into singing “Diddle, diddle, dumpling,” under the influence of liquor, whatever the company. His life, however, was a long, half-comic battle against those three friendly enemies of man--liquor, snuff and tobacco. His path was strewn with good resolutions. “This very night,” he wrote on one occasion, “I am going to _leave off tobacco_! Surely there must be some other world in which this unconquerable purpose shall be realised.” The perfect anecdote of Lamb’s vices is surely that which Hone tells of his abandonment of snuff: One summer’s evening I was walking on Hampstead Heath with Charles Lamb, and we talked ourselves into a philosophic contempt of our slavery to the habit of snuff-taking, and with the firm resolution of never again taking a single pinch, we threw our snuff-boxes away from the hill on which we stood, far among the furze and the brambles below, and went home in triumph. I began to be very miserable, and was wretched all night. In the morning I was walking on the same hill. I saw Charles Lamb below, searching among the bushes. He looked up laughing, and saying, “What, you are come to look for your snuff-box too!” “Oh, no,” said I, taking a pinch out of a paper in my waistcoat pocket, “I went for a halfpennyworth to the first shop that was open.” Lamb’s life is an epic of such things as this, and Mr. Lucas is its rhapsodist. He has written an anthological biography that will have a permanent place on the shelves beside the works of Lamb himself. VII BYRON ONCE MORE