Lamb’s poetical appreciation of London. “Nowhere,” he says, in the melodious concluding sentence, “is there so much difference (as in London) between rain and sunshine, nowhere do the clouds roll together more grandly ... the background of the great city, with its weighty atmosphere, and portent of storm in the rapid light on dome and bleached stone steeples.” Perhaps it may be thought that Pater’s judgment of Lamb is coloured by too strong an infusion of his own personality, and that the Charles Lamb of the essay is hardly recognisable, clothed, as he appears to be, in his critic’s very wardrobe; that Pater puts aside certain broad aspects of Lamb’s character as being less congenial to himself; but I should rather myself feel that he has indeed passed behind the smiling mask which Lamb often wore, or has, perhaps, persuaded him to doff it; and that he has thus got nearer, in fact, to this melancholy loving spirit, with its self-condemned indulgences, its vein of mockery, its long spaces of dreariness, its acute sensibilities. Lamb, one feels, was a pilgrim in hard places, and, like Bunyan’s pilgrims, caught desperately at the fruits that hung over the wall to relieve his sadness; and yet, in another mood, he was full of a tender quietism, with a large and loving outlook upon humanity and life. Pater seems to have come from reading Lamb like a friend who has been communing with a friend. They have talked without affectation and without disguises; and thus one feels that, though there has been, under the influence of sympathy, a certain suppression or suspension of modes of speech, of aspects of thought, that had a real bearing on Lamb’s character, yet that Pater has seen the innermost heart of the man with the insight that only affection can give, an insight which subtler and harder critics seem to miss, even though the picture they may draw is incontestably truer to detail. Besides these two critical appreciations, Pater wrote at this time a Shakespearian study, and the little essay on “Romanticism,” which re-appeared in 1889 as the Postscript to _Appreciations_, which may be shortly discussed here.