“You will see Coleridge; he who sits obscure
In the exceeding lustre and the pure
Intense irradiation of a mind
Which, with its own internal lightnings blind,
Flags wearily through darkness and despair—
A cloud-encircled meteor of the air,
A hooded eagle among blinking owls.”
CHAPTER XI
CHARLES LAMB
At one of those free-and-easy sociable gatherings in Lamb’s rooms, in the Temple, which Hazlitt has so happily immortalised, Lamb provoked some discussion by asking which of all the English literary men of the past one would most wish to have seen and known. Ayrton, who was of the company, said he would choose the two greatest names in English literature—Sir Isaac Newton and John Locke. “Every one burst out laughing,” writes Hazlitt, “at the expression of Lamb’s face, in which impatience was restrained by courtesy. ‘Yes, the greatest names,’ he stammered out hastily, ‘but they were not persons—not persons.... There is nothing personally interesting in the men.’” It is Lamb’s glory that he is both a great name and a great and interesting personality; and if his question were put again to-day in any company of book-lovers I should not be alone in saying at once that the writer of the past I would soonest have seen and known is Charles Lamb.
It is difficult to write of him without letting your enthusiasm run away with you. Except for a few reviewers of his own day (and the reviewers of one’s own day count for little or nothing the day after), nobody who knew Lamb in his life or has come to know him through his books and the books that tell of him has been able to write of him except with warmest admiration and affection. Even so testy and difficult a man as Landor, who only saw Lamb once, could not touch on his memory without profound emotion, and says in some memorial verses:—
“Of all that ever wore man’s form, ’tis thee
I first would spring to at the gates of heaven.”
And you remember Wordsworth’s—
“O, he was good, if e’er a good man lived!”