in a word for
Junius. Lamb could not bear 'Gil Blas;' this was a fault. I remember the
greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading him, after some years'
difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett. On one occasion he
was for making out a list of persons famous in history that one would
wish to see again, at the head of whom were Pontius Pilate, Sir Thomas
Browne, and Dr. Faustus; but we black-balled most of his list. But with
what a gusto he would describe his favourite authors, Donne or Sir
Philip Sidney, and call their most crabbed passages _delicious_. He
tried them on his palate, as epicures taste olives, and his observations
had a smack in them like a roughness on the tongue. With what
discrimination he hinted a defect in what he admired most, as in saying
the display of the sumptuous banquet in 'Paradise Regained' was not in
true keeping, as the simplest fare was all that was necessary to tempt
the extremity of hunger, and stating that Adam and Eve, in 'Paradise
Lost,' were too much like married people. He has furnished many a text
for Coleridge to preach upon. There was no fuss or cant about him; nor
were his sweets or sours ever diluted with one particle of affectation."

Towards the unhappy close of Sheridan's life, when weighed down by
illness and debt (he had just lost the election at Stafford, and felt
clouds and darkness gathering closer round him), he was thrown for
several days (about 1814) into a sponging-house in Tooke's Court,
Cursitor Street, Chancery Lane. Tom Moore describes meeting him shortly
before with Lord Byron, at the table of Rogers, and some days after
Sheridan burst into tears on hearing that Byron had said that he
(Sheridan) had written the best comedy, the best operetta, the best
farce, the best address, and delivered the best oration ever produced in
England. Sheridan's books and pictures had been sold; and from his
sordid prison he wrote a piteous letter to his kind but severely
business-like friend, Whitbread, the brewer. "I have done everything,"
he says, "to obtain my release, but in vain; and, Whitbread, putting all
false professions of friendship and feeling out of the question, you
have no right to keep me here, for it is in truth your act; if you had
not forcibly withheld from me the L12,000, in consequence of a letter
from a miserable swindler, whose claim you in particular know to be a
lie, I should at least have been out of the reach of this miserable
insult; for t