mad geese, with roaring something like bears, mows
and mops like apes, sometimes snakes, that hissed me into madness.
'Twas like St. Anthony's temptations. Mercy on us, that God should
give His favourite children, men, mouths to speak with, to
discourse rationally, to promise smoothly, to flatter agreeably, to
encourage warmly, to counsel wisely: to sing with, to drink with,
and to kiss with: and that they should turn them into the mouths of
adders, bears, wolves, hyenas, and whistle like tempests, and emit
breath through them like distillations of aspic poison, to asperse
and vilify the innocent labours of their fellow creatures who are
desirous to please them!

Or it may be a cold in the head which starts the heroic agility of his
tongue, and he writes a long letter without a full stop, which is as
full of substance as one of his essays. His technique is so incredibly
fine, he is such a Paganini of prose, that he can invent and reverse an
idea of pyramidal wit, as in this burlesque of a singer: 'The shake,
which most fine singers reserve for the close or cadence, by some
unaccountable flexibility, or tremulousness of pipe, she carrieth quite
through the composition; so that the time, to a common air or ballad,
keeps double motion, like the earth--running the primary circuit of the
tune, and still revolving upon its own axis'; and he can condense into
six words the whole life-history and the soul's essential secret of
Coleridge, when he says of him, in almost the last fragment of prose
that he wrote, 'he had a hunger for eternity.'

To read Lamb makes a man more humane, more tolerant, more dainty;
incites to every natural piety, strengthens reverence; while it clears
his brain of whatever dull fumes may have lodged there, stirs up all his
senses to wary alertness, and actually quickens his vitality, like high
pure air. It is, in the familiar phrase, 'a liberal education'; but it
is that finer education which sets free the spirit. His natural piety,
in the full sense of the word, seems to me deeper and more sensitive
than that of any other English writer. Kindness, in him, embraces
mankind, not with the wide engulfing arms of philanthropy, but with an
individual caress. He is almost the sufficient type of virtue, so far as
virtue can ever be loved; for there is not a weakness in him which is
not the bastard of some good quality, and not an error which had an
unsocial