I once said something in his presence which I thought possessed smartness.
He commended me with a stammer: "Very well, my dear boy, very well; Ben
(taking a pinch of snuff), Ben Jonson has said worse things than that-and
b-b-better." [1]

His young chimney-sweepers, "from their little pulpits (the tops of
chimneys) in the nipping air of a December morning, preach a lesson of
patience to mankind."

His saying to Martin Burney has been often repeated--"O Martin, if dirt
were trumps, what a hand you would hold!"

To Coleridge: "Bless you, old sophist, who next to human nature taught me
all the corruption I was capable of knowing."

To Mr. Gilman, a surgeon ("query Kill-man?"), he writes, "Coleridge is
very bad, but he wonderfully picks up, and his face, when he repeats his
verses, hath its ancient glory--an archangel a little damaged."

To Wordsworth (who was superfluously solemn) he writes, "Some d-d people
have come in, and I must finish abruptly. By d--d, I only mean deuced."

The second son of George the Second, it was said, had a very cold and
ungenial manner. Lamb stammered out in his defence that "this was very
natural in the Duke of Cu-Cum-ber-land."

To Bernard Barton, of a person of repute: "There must be something in him.
Such great names imply greatness. Which of us has seen Michael Angelo's
things? yet which of us disbelieves his greatness?"