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 Hellenists that are occasionally seen in modern
times. He might have turned to the mediaeval period. He had an eye
for cloisters and nuns. His fancy would have been struck with the
grotesqueness of many of the ideas and institutions of those times.
He would have got on finely with Gurth the swineherd and Burgundy the
tusk-toothed, and one of his masterly witticisms would have upset Duns
Scotus. Perhaps, of all the mediaeval characters, he would have been
most smitten with the court fool, and, if he could have been seated at
a princely table of the twelfth century, the bowl surely would not have
been round many times before he and the fool would have had a few passes
at each other. There was enough in the Middle Ages to have fascinated
him; and could he, like some romantic Novalis, have once penetrated
thither, and tasted the fruit, he would have found it a lotus, and
would have wished never to depart. His soul would have clung to church