tions of crime and punishment, he
"_dumb-founded_" a long tirade one evening, by taking the pipe out of
his mouth, and asking the speaker, "Whether he meant to say that a thief
was not a good man?" To a person abusing Voltaire, and indiscreetly
opposing his character to that of Jesus Christ, he said admirably well
(though he by no means overrated Voltaire, nor wanted reverence in the
other quarter), that "Voltaire was a very good Jesus Christ _for the
French_." He liked to see the church-goers continue to go to church, and
wrote a tale in his sister's admirable little book (_Mrs. Leicester's
School_) to encourage the rising generation to do so; but to a
conscientious deist he had nothing to object; and if an atheist had
found every other door shut against him, he would assuredly not have
found his. I believe he would have had the world remain precisely as it
was, provided it innovated no farther; but this spirit in him was any
thing but a worldly one, or for his own interest. He hardly contemplated
with patience the new buildings in the Regent's Park: and, privately
speaking, he had a grudge against _official_ heaven-expounders, or
clergymen. He would rather, however, have been with a crowd that he
disliked, than felt himself alone. He said to me one day, with a face of
great solemnity, "What must have been that man's feelings, who thought
himself _the first deist_?" Finding no footing in certainty, he
delighted to confound the borders of theoretical truth and falsehood. He
was fond of telling wild stories to children, engrafted on things about
them; wrote letters to people abroad, telling them that a friend of
theirs had come out in genteel comedy; and persuaded George Dyer that
_Lord Castlereagh_ was the author of Waverley! The same excellent person
walking one evening out of his friend's house into the New River, Lamb
(who was from home at the time) wrote a paper under his signature of
Elia, stating, that common friends would have stood dallying on the
bank, have sent for neighbors, &c., but that _he_, in his magnanimity,
jumped in, and rescued his friend after the old noble fashion. He wrote
in the same magazine two lives of Liston and Munden, which the public
took for serious, and which exhibit an extraordinary jumble of imaginary
facts and truth of by-painting. Munden he made born at "Stoke Pogeis:"
the very sound of which was like the actor speaking and digging his
words. He knew how many false conclusions and pret