An ancient manor-house, that Vanbrugh might have built, dwelt like a picture in his memory. "Nothing fills a child's mind like an old mansion," he says. Yet he could feel unaffectedly the simplicity and beauty of a country life. The heartiness of country people went to his heart direct, and remained there forever. The Fields and the Gladmans, with their homely dwellings and hospitality, drew him to them like magnets. There was nothing too fine nor too lofty in these friends for his tastes or his affection; they did not "affront him with their light." His fancy always stooped to moralize; he hated the stilted attitudes and pretensions of poetasters and self-glorifying artists. He never spoke disparagingly of any person, nor overpraised any one. When it was proposed to erect a statue of Clarkson, during his life, he objected to it: "We should be modest," he says, "for a modest man." He was himself eminently modest; he never put himself forward: he was always sought. He had much to say on many subjects, and he was repeatedly pressed to say this, before he consented to do so. He was almost teased into writing the Elia Essays. These and all his other writings are brief and to the point. He did not exhale in words. It was said that Coleridge's talk was worth so many guineas a sheet. Charles Lamb talked but sparingly. He put forth only so much as had complete flavor. I know that high pay and frequent importunity failed to induce him to squander his strength in careless essays: he waited until he could give them their full share of meaning and humor. When I speak of his extreme liking for London, it must not be supposed that he was insensible to great scenery. After his only visit to the Lake country, and beholding Skiddaw, he writes back to his host, "O! its fine black head, and the bleak air at the top of it, with a prospect of mountains all about making you giddy. It was a day that will stand out like a mountain in my life;" adding, however, "Fleet Street and the Strand are better places to live in, for good and all. I could not _live_ in Skiddaw. I could spend there two or three years; but I must have a prospect of seeing Fleet Street at the end of that time, or I should mope and pine away." He loved even its smoke, and asserted that it suited his vision. A short time previously he had, in a touching letter to Wordsworth (1801), enumerated the objects that he liked so much in London. "These things," he writes, "work themselves into my mind: the rooms where I was born; a bookcase that has followed me about like a faithful dog (only exceeding him in knowledge) wherever I have moved; old chairs; old tables; squares where I have sunned myself; my old school: these are my mistresses. Have I not enough, without your mountains? I do not envy you; I should pity you, did I not know that the mind will make friends with anything."