Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, it will be our aim to show how these two
most witty men were also intensely serious and dutiful,--how they
were both disciplined by a great sorrow, and obedient to a noble
purpose,--and thus to relieve wit from the charge of having any natural
alliance with frivolity.

A thorn, it needs not a sage to say, vexes the side of every human
being. Poetry laments the inadequacy of men to their ideals, philosophy
declares an error in the figures which sum up life, religion reveals
the fall of the race. The thorn is known which pierced the matchless
joyousness of Charles Lamb. His family, highly gifted with wit,
tenderness of feeling, and mutual love, had a tinge of madness in the
blood. At twenty years of age he was himself shut up six weeks in a
madhouse, his imagination in a vagary. He was not again affected; but
the poison had sunk deeper into the veins of his sister. The shadow of a
deed done in the dark ever pursued her. Charles devoted his life to
her whose life was an intermittent madness, yet who, in her months of
sanity, was a worthy sister of such a brother. His kindness to her knew
no bounds. It was strange that she had premonition of the recurring fits
of her disorder; and when the ghost of unreason beckoned, Charles
took her by the hand and led her to the appointed home. Charles Lloyd
relates, that, at dusk one evening, he met them crossing the field
together on their melancholy way toward the asylum, both of them in
tears. In the smiles of Charles Lamb, and they were many, his friends
always remarked a prevailing expression of sadness. The "fair-haired
maid," who had been the theme of his first poetizing, appears not again
in his verses or in his life. He and Mary lived together, received
evening visitors together, went to the theatre and picture-gallery
together, visited the lakes and the poets together; and if he was ever
seen in public without her, his friends knew there could be but one