If one reads Lamb's earlier essays and prose pieces one can see the process at work--watch him consciously imitating Fuller, or Burton, or Browne, mirroring their idiosyncrasies, making their quaintnesses and graces his own.

By the time he came to write the _Essays of Elia_, he had mastered the personal style so completely that his essays seem simply the overflow of talk.
They are so desultory; they move from one subject to another so waywardly--such an essay as a _Chapter on Ears_, for instance, passing with the easy inconsequence of conversation from anatomy through organ music to beer--when they quote, as they do constantly, it is incorrectly, as in the random reminiscences of talk.

Here one would say is the cream risen to the surface of a full mind and skimmed at one taking.

How far all this is from the truth we know--know, too, how for months he polished and rewrote these magazine articles, rubbing away roughnesses and corners, taking off the traces of logical sequences and argument, till in the finished work of art he mimicked inconsequence so perfectly that his friends might have been deceived.

And the personality he put on paper was partly an artistic creation, too.