The _Tatler_ and the _Spectator_ leave you with a sense of artifice; Hazlitt and Lamb leave you with a grip of a real personality--in the one case very vigorous and combative, in the other set about with a rare plaintiveness and gentleness, but in both absolutely sincere.

Addison is gay and witty and delightful but he only plays at being human; Lamb's essays--the translation into print of a heap of idiosyncrasies and oddities, and likes and dislikes, and strange humours--come straight and lovably from a human soul.
The prose writers of the romantic movement brought back two things into writing which had been out of it since the seventeenth century.

They brought back egotism and they brought back enthusiasm.

They had the confidence that their own tastes and experiences were enough to interest their readers; they mastered the gift of putting themselves on paper.
But there is one wide difference between them and their predecessors.
Robert Burton was an egotist but he was an unconscious one; the same is, perhaps, true though much less certainly of Sir Thomas Browne.

In Lamb and Hazlitt and De Quincey egotism was deliberate, consciously assumed, the result of a compelling and shaping art.