Speaking of Don Quixote, he calls him "the errant Star of Knighthood, made more tender by eclipse."
On being asked by a schoolmistress for some sign indicative of her calling, he recommended "The Murder of the Innocents."
I once said something in his presence which I thought possessed smartness. He commended me with a stammer: "Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben (taking a pinch of snuff), Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and b-b-better." [1]
His young chimney-sweepers, "from their little pulpits (the tops of chimneys) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of patience to mankind."
His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated—"O Martin, if dirt were trumps, what a hand you would hold!"
To Coleridge: "Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me all the corruption I was capable of knowing."
To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon ("query Kill-man?"), he writes, "Coleridge is very bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his verses, hath its ancient glory—an archangel a little damaged."
To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, "Some d-d people have come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d—d, I only mean deuced."
The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very natural in the Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land."
To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: "There must be something in him. Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo's things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?"