Could anything be more charming, or more untrue than this? Montaigne, perched tranquilly on his Guyenne hill-slope, may have escaped the goad; but we, the victims of our swifter day, know too well how remorselessly Lady Vanity pricks us round the course. Are we not perpetually showing our paces at her command, and under the sharp incentive of her heel? Yet Charles Lamb, in the heart of London, preserved by some fine instinct the same intellectual freedom that Montaigne cherished in sleepy Gascony. He too was fain to read for pleasure, and his unswerving sincerity is no less enviable than the clearness of his literary insight. Indeed, while many of his favorite authors may have no message for our ears, yet every line in which he writes his love is pregnant with enjoyment; every word expresses subtly a delicious sense of satisfaction. The soiled and torn copies of _Tom Jones_ and _The Vicar of Wakefield_ from the circulating library, which speak eloquently to him of the thousand thumbs that have turned over each well-worn page; the “kind-hearted play-book” which he reaches down from some easy shelf; the old _Town and Country Magazine_ which he finds in the window-seat of an inn; the “garrulous, pleasant history” of Burnet; the “beautiful, bare narrative” of _Robinson Crusoe_; the antiquated, time-stained edition of “that fantastic old great man,” Robert Burton; the Folio Beaumont and Fletcher—all these and many more are Lamb’s tried friends, and he writes of them with lingering affection. He is even able, through some fine choice of words, to convey to us the precise degree and quality of pleasure which they yield him, and which he wins us to share, not by exhortations or reproaches, but gently, with alluring smiles, and hinted promises of reward. How craftily he holds each treasured volume before our eyes! How apt the brief, caressing sentence in which he sings its praises!—“The sweetest names, and which carry a perfume in the mention, are Kit Marlowe, Drayton, Drummond of Hawthornden, and Cowley.” “Milton almost requires a solemn service of music to be played before you enter upon him. Who listens, had need bring docile thoughts, and purged ears.” “Winter evenings—the world shut out—with less of ceremony the gentle Shakespeare enters. At such a season, the _Tempest_, or his own _Winter’s Tale_.”