a vehicle for the expression of a personality, and it continued to seek the interests of its readers by creating or suggesting an individuality strong enough to carry off any desultory adventure by the mere force of its own attractiveness.  Yet there is all the difference in the world between Hazlitt and Addison, or Lamb and Steele.  The Tatler and the Spectator leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality—­in the one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere.  Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb’s essays—­the translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and strange humours—­come straight and lovably from a human soul.

The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century.  They brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm.  They had the confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper.  But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors.  Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne.  In Lamb and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, the result of a compelling and shaping art.  If one reads Lamb’s earlier essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work—­watch him consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own.  By the time he came to write the Essays of Elia, he had mastered the personal style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk.  They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so waywardly—­such an essay as a Chapter on Ears, for instance, passing with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ music to beer—­when they quote, as they do constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk.  Here one would say is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one taking.  How far all this is from the truth we know—­know, too, how for months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so perfectly that his friends might have been deceived.  And the personality he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too.  In life Lamb was a nervous, easily excitable and emotional man; his years were worn with the memory of a great tragedy and the constantly impending fear of a repetition of it.  One must assume him in his way to have been a good man of business—­he