And after listening to the stout, brawny, two-fisted, whole-soled, big-hearted, large-brained Parson A----, as he talked in his wise and winsome manner about Charles Lamed and his writings, I could not refrain from forthwith procuring and reading Elia's famous and immortal essays. Since then I have been a constant reader of Elia, and a most zealous admirer of Charles Lamb the author and Charles Lamb the man. Thackeray, you remember, somewhere mentions a youthful admirer of Dickens, who, when she is happy, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"--when she is unhappy, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"--when she is in bed, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"--when she has nothing to do, reads "Nicholas Nickleby,"--and when she has finished the book, reads "Nicholas Nickleby": and so do I read and re-read the essays and letters of Charles Lamb; and the oftener I read them, the better I like then, the higher I value them. Indeed, I live upon the essays of Elia, as Hazlitt did upon "Tristram Shandy," as a sort of food that simulates with my natural disposition. And yet, despite all my love and admiration of Charles Lamb,--nay, rather in consequence of it,--I must blame him of what Mr. Barron Field was please to eulogize him for,--writing so little. Undoubtedly in most authors suppression in writing would be a virtue. In Lamb it was a fault. There are a score or two of subjects which he, "no less from temerity than felicity of his pen," should have written upon,--subjects on which he had thought and ruminated for years, and which he, and none but he, could do justice to. He who loved and admired before or since, such sterling old writers as Burton, Browne, Fuller, and Walton, should have given us an article on each of those worthies and their inditing. Chaucer and Spenser, though proud and happy in having had such an appreciating reader of there writings as Elia was, when denizen of this earth, would, methinks, have given him a warmer, heartier, gladder welcome to heaven, if he had done for them what he did for Hogarth and the old dramatists,--pointed out to the would "with a finger of fire" the truth and beauty contained in their works. Instead of writing only two volumes of essays, Elia should have written a dozen. He had read, heard, thought, and seen enough to furnish matter for twice that number. He himself confesseth, in a letter written a year or two before his death, that he felt as if he had a thousand essays swelling within him. Oh that Elia, like Mr. Spectator, had printed himself out before he died!