uty which he never for a moment forgot.

It was his good-fortune, while at school at Christ's Hospital, to become
acquainted with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A timid boy, creeping around
among his boisterous companions like a little monk, it was that soaring
spirit which first taught him to look up. Two men whose intellects more
strongly contrasted could not be found. Coleridge suffered throughout
life from over-much speculation. Could he have had his eye less upon the
heavens and more upon the earth, could he have been concentrated upon
some human duty, he would have been a much wiser and better man. Even in
his youth he was the rhapsodist of old philosophies, had resolved social
life into its elements, and dreamed of putting it together again to suit
himself on the banks of the Susquehannah. Though Lamb wondered at the
speculations of Coleridge, and, loving him, loved the metaphysics which
were a part of him, yet it was without changing his own essentially
opposite disposition. Lamb clung to the earth. He cultivated the
excellency of this life. He was concrete, and hugged the world as he
did his sister. He reverently followed the discourses of Coleridge,
admiring, perhaps, "the beauty of the words, but not the words
themselves"; but when the Opium-Eater also began to take speculative
flights before Lamb, the latter stopped him at once by jangling his
metaphysics into jokes. It was in conversation with Coleridge, begun at
school and continued afterward at frequent meetings, that Lamb first
ventured to try his own powers and was prompted to literary activity.
But for a slight defect in his speech, he would probably have followed
Coleridge to the University with the intention of going into the Church.
A delightful clergyman he would have been, if he had duly undertaken the
office, and one would have walked far to see him in the priestly robe,
to hear him chant the service, to receive pastoral advice from him; yet
we fear the "Essays of Elia" would have been less admirable than now. He
was roused by Coleridge; and though he could not put the aureole of the
latter about his own head, he began to do the best he could in his own
way.

Life is a play between accident and purpose. Why was it, that, of all
the books in the world, Charles Lamb should have fixed his affections
chiefly on the old English dramatists? He might have turned to old
Greece, admired the fruits of the classic ages, and become one of those
sparkling artistic