Yet who can help
feeling that his style is regular because the matter he deals with is
the somewhat uncontentious, even, limited soul, of an age not
imaginative, and unambitious in its speculative flight? Even in
Steele himself we may observe with what sureness of instinct the men
of that age turned aside at the contact of anything likely to make
them, in any sense, forget themselves.
No one indicates better than Charles Lamb, to whose memory Mr. Alfred
Ainger has done such good service, the great and peculiar change
which was begun at the end of the last century, and dominates our
own; that sudden increase of the width, the depth, the complexity of
intellectual interest, which has many times torn and distorted
literary style, even with those best able to comprehend its laws. In
Mrs. Leicester's School, with other Writings in Prose and Verse
(Macmillan), Mr. Ainger has collected and annotated certain remains
of Charles and Mary Lamb, too good to lie unknown to the present
generation, in forgotten periodicals or inaccessible reprints. The
story of the Odyssey, abbreviated [13] in very simple prose, for
children--of all ages--will speak for itself. But the garland of
graceful stories which gives name to the volume, told by a party of
girls on the evening of their assembling at school, are in the
highest degree characteristic of the brother and sister who were ever
so successful in imparting to others their own enjoyment of books and
people.
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