me for height
Against Kean;
But in a grand tragic scene
I'm nothing.
It would create a kind of loathing
To see me act Hamlet;
There'd be many a damn let
Fly
At my presumption,
If I should try,--
Being a fellow of no gumption."

And so on through half a dozen verses of exquisite nonsense. And in
every little note to his many friends there was always some
characteristic touch to excite their ready smiles; as in the note to
Coleridge, who had carried off some of his books:--"There is a devilish
gap in my shelf where you have knocked out the two eye-teeth," and where
he goes on to beg him in a whimsical way to return them--because,
although he had himself borrowed them of somebody else, they had long
adorned his shelf. Truly, most people who own books at all can
sympathize with Lamb in this, though they may think he got off lightly
to have only the two eye-teeth knocked out. We have known of cases where
cuspids, bicuspids, and molars have all been extracted. These letters
are all exquisitely droll, the most of them containing a gentle oath or
two, as where he wrote "Some d----d people have come in, and I must
stop;" and then recollecting that he was writing to a "proper" person,
making a postscript which says, "when I wrote d----d I only meant
deuced." But one would as soon think of dropping out Shakspeare's
adjective, and saying (as a very prim lady we once knew did in reading
Lady Macbeth's soliloquy), "Out, spot!" as to drop out any of Lamb's
qualifying words. He was sometimes accused of being irreverent, as in
his article upon "Saying Graces," where he affirms that he is more
disposed to say grace upon twenty other occasions in the course of the
day than before his dinner, and inquires why not say them over books,
those spiritual repasts. But he was very far indeed from being
irreverent, and had much of genuine religious feeling.

His hospitality was unbounded, and the evenings at his home have become
as well known in literature as the grand evenings at Holland House.

His friends were the first literary men of the day,--Wordsworth, Leigh
Hunt, Barry Cornwall, Talfourd, Hazlitt, Southey, Coleridge,--all the
giants of that day and generation, and he was loved by them all. Not
that they did not know and deplore his faults,--or his one fault; for if
he could have conquered his fondness for wine he would have had none of
much moment left. But even this was overlooked by his f