apart for cards and conversation, and those occasions are perhaps
among the best remembered features of early nineteenth-century
literary life. Representative evenings will be found described in
various works.[3] The company was not limited to literary folk, though
many notable men of letters were to be met there, along with humbler
friends, for the Lambs were catholic in their friendships, and had
nothing of the exclusiveness of more pretentious salons. "We play at
whist, eat cold meat and hot potatoes, and any gentleman that chooses
smokes." At these gatherings Mary Lamb moved about observantly looking
after her diverse guests, while Lamb himself, it has been said, might
be depended upon for at once the wisest and the wittiest utterance of
the evening. Here it was that he made his whimsical reproach to a
player with dirty hands: "I say, Martin, if dirt were trumps what a
hand you'd have." And it was on some such occasion, too, that he
retorted on Wordsworth, who had said that the writing of "Hamlet" was
not so very wonderful: "Here's Wordsworth says he could have written
'Hamlet'--_if he had the mind_."

[Footnote 3: In Talfourd's "Memorials" of Lamb; in Hazlitt's essay "Of
Persons One would wish to have Seen."]

In the opening years of the century Lamb contributed epigrams and
paragraphs to "The Albion," "The Morning Chronicle," and "The Morning
Post" (thanks to Coleridge's introduction). His latest contribution to
the first-named journal helped to bring about its sudden demise. One
of the latest which was pointed at Sir James Mackintosh (author of
"Vindicæ Gallicæ") may serve as a specimen of the personal epigram in
which Lamb considered himself happiest:

Though thou'rt like Judas an apostate black,