of the punch-bowl in vanquishing trouble, professionally wielding the
religious and moral ideas, and habitually obeying them, he stood erect
and looked at the life to come with a firm eye. "The beauty of the
Christian religion," he says, "is that it carries the order and
discipline of heaven into our very fancies and conceptions, and, by
hallowing the first shadowy notions of our minds, from which actions
spring, makes our actions themselves good and holy." This central and
vital beauty he had cultivated in a very diversified life, and he looked
with confidence for the prize which is laid up for the well-doer.

Probably, if any successful life were examined, it would be found to
consist of a series of hairbreadth escapes. Every movement would be the
crossing of the Rubicon. That man is of little account who at every step
that he has taken has not been weighing matters as nicely as if he were
matching diamonds. How narrowly did Coleridge escape being the greatest
preacher, philosopher, poet, or author of his time! Almost everything
was possible to him; and one can but marvel how he went through life
avoiding in turn each of his highest possibilities. It is the glory of
Charles Lamb and Sydney Smith, that, as far as it can be said of any
men, they did the best that was possible with their circumstances and
endowments. The old fancy which says of every person, that there is an
ideal character which he can attain, in which he shall be peculiar and
unsurpassed, was in their cases realized.

Their characters were projected into literature, where they remain as
permanent blessings. The style of writing of both of them approaches to
the simplest way of saying things. Elia employed the choicest language
of the seventeenth century, and the divine used the plainest English of
the day. The perpetual danger of literature is of becoming rhetorical;
and hardly fares vigor of thought when long words and periods are