Page:A happy half-century and other essays.djvu/227

 Rh dandy plates, the names of contributors poked up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled through all the covers of magazines, the barefaced sort of emulation, the immodest candidateship, brought into so little space; in short I detest to appear in an annual. … Don't think I set up for being proud on this point; I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as any one. But these pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So there's a bit of my mind."

"Frippery," "frumpery," "show and emptiness," are the mildest epithets at Lamb's command, as often as he laments his repeated falls from grace; and a few years before his death, when that "dumb soporifical good-for-nothingness" (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his pen, and dulled the lively processes of his brain, he writes with poignant melancholy:—

"I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when not on foot, very desolate, and take no interest in anything, scarce hate anything but annuals." It is the last expression of a just antipathy, an instinctive clinging to something which can be reasonably hated to the end.