Customs, stiff to us, stiff dresses, stiff furniture--types of cast-off
fashions, left by accident, and which no one ever meant to preserve--we
contemplate with more than good-nature, as having in them the veritable
accent of a time, not altogether to be replaced by its more solemn and
self-conscious deposits; like those tricks of individuality which we
find quite tolerable in persons, because they convey to us the secret of
lifelike expression, and with regard to which we are all to some extent
humourists. But it is part of the privilege of the genuine humourists to
anticipate this pensive mood with regard to the ways and things of his
own day; to look upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with
that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to
those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by
chance of its mere external habit. Seeing things always by the light of
an understanding more entire than is possible for ordinary minds, of the
whole mechanism of humanity, and seeing also the manner, the outward
mode or fashion, always in strict connection with the spiritual
condition which determined it, a humourist such as Charles Lamb
anticipates the enchantment of distance; and the characteristics of
places, ranks, habits of life, are transfigured for him, even now and in
advance of time, by poetic light; justifying what some might condemn as
mere sentimentality, in the effort to hand on unbroken the tradition of
such fashion or accent.
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