the
children gradually grew fainter to my view, receding and still receding,
till nothing at last but two mournful features were seen in the
uttermost distance, which, without speech, strangely impressed upon me
the effects of speech. 'We are not of Alice nor of thee, nor are we
children at all. The children of Alice call Bartrum father. We are
nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only _what might
have been_.'"

Godwin! Hazlitt! Coleridge! Where now are their "novel philosophies and
systems"? Bottled moonshine, which does _not_ improve by keeping.

"Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in the dust."

Were we disposed to admit that Lamb would in all probability have been
as good a man as every one agrees he was--as kind to his father, as full
of self-sacrifice for the sake of his sister, as loving and ready a
friend--even though he had paid more heed to current speculations, it is
yet not without use in a time like this, when so much stress is laid
upon anxious inquiry into the mysteries of soul and body, to point out
how this man attained to a moral excellence denied to his speculative
contemporaries; performed duties from which they, good men as they were,
would one and all have shrunk: how, in short, he contrived to achieve
what no one of his friends, not even the immaculate Wordsworth or the
precise Southey, achieved--the living of a life the records of which are
inspiriting to read, and are indeed "the presence of a good diffused";
and managed to do it all without either "wrangling with or accepting"
the opinions that "hurtled in the air" about him.

BENVENUTO CELLINI

From 'Obiter Dicta'

What a liar was Benvenuto Cellini!--who can believe a word he says? To
hang a dog on his oath would be a judicial murder. Yet when we lay down
his Memoirs and let our thoughts travel back to those far-off days he
tells us of, there we see him standing, in bold relief, against the
black sky of the past, the very man he was. Not more surely did he, with
that rare skill of his, stamp the image of Clement VII. on the papal
currency, than he did the impress of his own singular personality upon
every word he spoke and every sentence he wrote.

We ought, of course, to hate him, but do we? A murderer he has written
himself down. A liar he stands self-convicted of being. Were any one in
the nether world bold enough to call him thief, it may be doubted
whether Rhadamanthus would award him the d