by putting forth such a libel. The man apologized, and
said that the artist meant no offense. There never was a true portrait
of Lamb. His features were strongly yet delicately cut: he had a fine
eye as well as forehead; and no face carried in it greater marks of
thought and feeling. It resembled that of Bacon, with less worldly vigor
and more sensibility.

As his frame, so was his genius. It was as fit for thought as could be,
and equally as unfit for action; and this rendered him melancholy,
apprehensive, humorous, and willing to make the best of every thing as
it was, both from tenderness of heart and abhorrence of alteration. His
understanding was too great to admit an absurdity; his frame was not
strong enough to deliver it from a fear. His sensibility to strong
contrasts was the foundation of his humor, which was that of a wit at
once melancholy and willing to be pleased. He would beard a
superstition, and shudder at the old phantasm while he did it. One could
have imagined him cracking a jest in the teeth of a ghost, and then
melting into thin air himself, out of a sympathy with the awful. His
humor and his knowledge both, were those of Hamlet, of Moliere, of
Carlin, who shook a city with laughter, and, in order to divert his
melancholy, was recommended to go and hear himself. Yet he extracted a
real pleasure out of his jokes, because good-heartedness retains that
privilege when it fails in every thing else. I should say he
condescended to be a punster, if condescension had been a word befitting
wisdom like his. Being told that somebody had lampooned him, he said,
"Very well, I'll Lamb-pun him." His puns were admirable, and often
contained as deep things as the wisdom of some who have greater names;
such a man, for instance, as Nicole the Frenchman, who was a baby to
him. He would have cracked a score of jokes at him, worth his whole book
of sentences; pelted his head with pearls. Nicole would not have
understood him, but Rochefoucault would, and Pascal, too; and some of
our old Englishmen would have understood him still better. He would have
been worthy of hearing Shakspeare read one of his scenes to him, hot
from the brain. Commonplace found a great comforter in him as long as
it was good-natured; it was to the ill-natured or the dictatorial only
that he was startling. Willing to see society go on as it did, because
he despaired of seeing it otherwise, but not at all agreeing in his
interior with the common no