reason for it, and did not ask. When he left the India House, he had
reserved from his income a considerable sum for her support; though the
liberality of his employers, as it proved, rendered this precaution
unnecessary. She was his partner in writing the Shakspearian tales, and
he always affirmed that hers were better done than his own. To her
he dedicated the first poems that he published; and she, too, was a
poetess, excellent in her simple way. Thus was Charles Lamb's life
saddened by a great affliction ever impending over it, and sanctified by
a great duty 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