Page:Essays in miniature.djvu/24

 20 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,