Page:Studies of a Biographer 2.djvu/202

 He requests all but youthful readers to abstain from one of his papers, and explains that 'youthful' includes some 'from the age of twelve to that of four-score years and ten.' Youth is 'something in the soul which has no more to do with the colour of the hair than the vein of gold in a rock has to do with the grass a thousand feet above it.' No one has ever insisted upon that text so emphatically and persistently. The 'poems of the class of 1829' have no doubt been surpassed in the highest qualities by some autobiographical series that might be mentioned, but their merits as occasional verse have an almost unique personal interest. Every year from 1851 till 1889 sees the laureate of the old set of friends proclaiming—as long as it can be done by even a poetical fiction—that they are still 'boys,' and when even the fiction would be too sad, still claiming undying youth for the old affection. So, as he says in 1884, after setting forth a characteristic analogy:—

Although when Lamb wrote his pathetic Old