ed
warily in this matter. A dispute as to the respective merits of Gray and
Collins has been known to result in a visit to an attorney and the
revocation of a will. An avowed inability to see anything in Miss
Austen's novels is reported to have proved destructive of an otherwise
good chance of an Indian judgeship. I believe, however, I run no great
risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one
loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon
only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his 'Life and
Letters' as with 'Elia.'

But how does he illustrate the particular question now engaging our
attention?

Speaking of his sister Mary, who, as every one knows, throughout 'Elia'
is called his cousin Bridget, he says:--

"It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have
wished, to have had for her associates and mine free-thinkers, leaders
and disciples of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither
wrangles with nor accepts their opinions."

Nor did her brother. He lived his life cracking his little jokes and
reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the
opinions of the friends he loved to see around him. To a contemporary
stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and
useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers.
_They_ discussed their great schemes and affected to prove deep
mysteries, and were constantly asking, "What is truth?" _He_ sipped his
glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry,
"What are trumps?" But to us, looking back upon that little group, and
knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is
possible. To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever
standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to
take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them. No
need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us
boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the
churches--with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "logician, metaphysician, bard."

There are some men whom to abuse is pleasant. Coleridge is not one of
them. How gladly we would love the author of 'Christabel' if we could!
But the thing is flatly impossible. His was an unlovely character. The
sentence passed upon him by Mr. Matthew Arnold (parenthetically, in one
of the 'Essays in Crit