told it you, if you please, that he who hath not a dram of folly in
his mixture, hath pounds of much worse matter in his composition."

"The Quakers' Meeting" is a delicate and impressive verbal
representation of the spirit of Quakerdom as revealed to one not a
Quaker but ready to appreciate the quietist spirit. Those who have
never attended a meeting of the kind feel that they have realized its
significance when they come across a passage such as this:

More frequently the meeting is broken up without a word
having been spoken. But the mind has been fed. You go away
with a sermon, not made with hands. You have been in the
milder caverns of Trophonius; or as in some den, where that
fiercest and savagest of all wild creatures, the Tongue,
that unruly member, has strangely lain tied up and captive.
You have bathed with stillness--O, when the spirit is sore
fettered, even tired to sickness of the janglings and
nonsense noises of the world, what a balm and a solace it
is, to go and seat yourself for a quiet half hour, upon some
undisputed corner of a bench, among the gentle Quakers!

Then follows a quaint Elian touch of humour in the application of a
line of Wordsworth's far from that poet's intention: "Their garb and
stillness conjoined, present an uniformity, tranquil and
herd-like--as in the pasture--'forty feeding like one.'"

An encounter in a coach with a loquacious gentleman whom he took to be
a school-master set Lamb musing on the differences between "The Old
and the New School-Master," on the way in which the pedagogue is
differentiated by the very conditions of his labours not only from his